Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century
(Palgrave Macmillan; 1st ed. 2016 edition)
This collection of essays explores how readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of “English literature” in the 1800s, expressing love for books and their authors through a wide variety of media and social practices. While love as such is difficult to quantify or recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also (for example) in monuments, in art, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, the authors aim to expand the normal range of literary reception studies.
Review by Frank Christianson presented at Faculty Book Lunch
The author of Necromanticism, explores a related form of philia in the co-edited essay collection Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth-Century. Examining a formative chapter in the history of Anglophone culture—when Englishness was imagined and materialized beyond Britain’s shores—editors Paul Westover and Ann Wierda Rowland have set themselves the formidable task of turning “love” into a term of art in literary studies. Moving chronologically, beginning in the 1830s, the chapters in this volume consider how the collective act of reading literature in English came to define English Literature as a cultural inheritance. These accounts of author love paradoxically challenge author-centric approaches to periodization. They detail “procreative afterlives” in what amount to “extended histories” of books and their writers as they manifested in the US and Britain over generations within an increasingly varied media landscape. In their careful selection and lucid framing of the essays, Westover and Rowland make the case for a more expansive literary study that documents the “constructive role of reception” in forming social networks of readerships. With essays on Sarah Hale, Wordsworth, Cooper, and Tennyson, among others, this collection may be one of the best explanations to date of how the English literary canon was shaped by a transatlantic context. More importantly, it speaks effectively to more fundamental questions of why we read, and study, and cherish literature in the first place, and how certain kinds of love inspire us to affiliate with each other across space and time and make a culture of the stories we share.