Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1680 - 1830

Transatlantic relations were central to Britons’ and Americans’ literary imaginations and histories between the first colonial settlements and the mid nineteenth century. This volume of essays enlists experts from both sides of the Atlantic to take stock and to re-focus the central issues and topics in Anglophone transatlantic literary studies in the period. The organizing principle of this collection is genre because--like people and with them--genres travel. In Derrida’s punning formulation, genres are a passe partout. Like the mat surrounding a painting (passepartout), generic conventions set off, frame and serve as a base or backing for individual works, differentiating recognizable units of discourse from the wealth of surrounding language. At the same time, genres pass everywhere like a passport, carrying a changing variety of hybrid contents with them like a portemanteau. Genres traverse seas and oceans, pass through ports and across ethnic frontiers, national boundaries and local distinctions of gender and class, to weave their circuitous way over diverse linguistic and cultural territories. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how genres traveled in exemplary ways across the British-American Atlantic world, moving back and forth across the ocean and carrying diverse contents with them as they went.