Search

This essay argues that scholarship being done under the sign of transatlantic studies, and Victorian transatlantic studies in particular, is problematically focused on the anglophone northern Atlantic region. Challenging both the essentialness and the disciplinary primacy of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, I argue instead that the entire nineteenth-century Atlantic world was a geographically and linguistically permeable space. Paying attention to crossings from north to south and vice versa is both methodologically and ethically necessary. From a methodological perspective, it can help us produce much more thorough answers to the questions transatlantic studies purports to ask about identity and community. But reading beyond anglophone British and U.S. American texts can also help us decolonize our reading and thinking. Of course, work like this requires scholars to read in second and third languages; as such, this essay discusses and denaturalizes the institutional barriers to multilingual English studies. It also offers a case study—a brief reading of a novel by Argentine writer Vicente Fidel López—demonstrating the insights that can be gained by expanding both our geographic perspective and our methodological toolbox.

Scholarship on travel writing tends to focus on accounts by writers who spent time in the places they depict. But neither Romantic-era nor twenty-first-century cognitive theory gives such a limited...

Small fossils are preserved as phosphatic (carbonate fluorapatite) micro-steinkerns (~ 0.5 mm diameter) in Upper Ordovician beds of the Cincinnati area. Mollusks are common, along with bryozoan zooecia, echinoderm ossicles, and other taxa. Similar occurrences of Ordovician micromorphic mollusks have been interpreted as ecologically dwarfed and adapted to oxygen-starved conditions, an interpretation with implications for ocean anoxia. An alternative explanation for small phosphatic steinkerns is taphonomic. Stable carbonate fluorapatite selectively filled small voids, thus preserving small fossils, including larval/young mollusks. Reworking concentrated small phosphatic steinkerns from multiple generations while larger, unfilled calcareous shells were destroyed, resulting in small fossils progressively replacing larger fossils. With thin sections and insoluble residues, we document evidence that many of these steinkerns are incomplete (“teilsteinkerns”) recording small parts of larger, normal-size...

This article argues that William Henry Hudson’s novel The Purple Land figures Anglo-Argentine contact in the age of informal empire as constituted through narrative storytelling. Narrative structures encounters among people on local and global levels, and Hudson shows that narrative is simultaneously the most natural conduit and the most stubborn barrier to transnational hybridity on both personal and national scales. This argument locates Hudson, therefore, in the convergence between global exchange, in the specific form of British capital that precipitated Argentine dependence in the world system, and local interpersonal exchange as a site of narrative and nationalist self-fashioning.

IT HAS BEEN ROUGHLY TWO HUNDRED YEARS SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF Anna Laetitia Barbauld's explosively controversial poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and the same span has elapsed since the Latin American wars of independence, an event her poem prophesies, celebrates, and closes with. This dual bicentennial is a reminder that we have yet to do justice to the impact of the Latin American revolutions on Barbauld's poem, or on Romantic literature more generally. Bringing Latin America into our understanding of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--something transatlantic studies have only sporadically attempted (1)--shows Eighteen Hundred and Eleven to be part of a lively conversation about the informal networks of imperialism rapidly emerging between Great Britain and the Spanish American colonies in revolt. In fact, the narrative form of Barbauld's poem offers a remarkable resistance to the discourses of what has recently come to be known as "informal empire" as they first began to circulate. It is therefore a profitable lens through which Romantic-era questions of revolution, sovereignty, and empire can be freshly complicated to account for a new and troubling configuration of global influence. At the time Barbauld was writing Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Latin America (2) was beginning to revolt against Spain, creating a flurry of transatlantic activity. Writers and revolutionaries like Francisco de Miranda, Andres Bello, and Simon Bolivar went to London to seek financial partnership, while British officials and Romantic poets began to think seriously about how such newly opened Atlantic relations might create an opportunity for Great Britain to seize control over American markets and resources. Critics have identified this as the birth of what we now call modern neocolonialism or informal empire. (3) In Barbauld's day these terms did not exist, but it was no secret that if the Spanish American colonies were to win independence, the British might re-subject them to financial control. As early as 1809 James Mill had written in the Edinburgh Review: "The fate of Spain is sealed.... The only question remaining for Britain is whether it will take Spanish America for itself ... whether Spanish America will become free under the auspices of British protection." (4) Throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain would enact this very fantasy; Latin America emerged politically sovereign into waiting structures of financial subjugation. These mechanisms of financial dependence had been employed sporadically before, within and without Great Britain's formal empire, but the nineteenth century would witness an unprecedentedly vast institutionalization of informal empire as a primary means of exerting influence in the new world. In other words, Latin American revolution reorganized the Atlantic network in two crucial ways: it shifted control of the Americas from Spain to Britain, and it made way for informal empire to step out of the shadow of territorial colonialism as a unique and perhaps even more effective means of overseas dominance. British-Latin American relations offer dynamic ways to revive the well-worn questions of imperial power. Robert Aguirre's 2006 Informal Empire and Rebecca Cole Heinowitz's 2010 Spanish America and British Romanticism both remind nineteenth-century scholars that Great Britain had powerful imaginative and material ties to the southern Americas. Alongside several other key voices in the field, (5) they have noted that while British informal empire in Latin America had forceful impacts that merit a sustained inquiry such as the formal empire has received, informal empire also operated under strange and distinct logics. Unlike traditional colonial targets, Latin America entered the Romantic imagination as a powerful symbol of liberty from oppression. Those who wished to return the region to a state of dependency under British imperial power, therefore, faced a unique rhetorical and logical problem, one that began to spark subtle reconfigurations of what "sovereignty" might mean and how it might be undermined in new ways. …