Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies
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Series Editor: Kevin Hutchings, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada, and Julia M. Wright, Dalhousie University, Canada
Focusing on the long nineteenth century (ca. 1750-1900), this series offers a forum for the publication of scholarly work investigating the literary, historical, artistic, and philosophical foundations of transatlantic culture. A new and burgeoning field of interdisciplinary investigation, transatlantic scholarship contextualizes its objects of study in relation to exchanges, interactions, and negotiations that occurred between and among authors and other artists hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, transatlantic research calls into question established disciplinary boundaries that have long functioned to segregate various national or cultural literatures and art forms, challenging as well the traditional academic emphasis upon periodization and canonization. By examining representations dealing with such topics as travel and exploration, migration and diaspora, slavery, aboriginal culture, revolution, colonialism and anti-colonial resistance, the series will offer new insights into the hybrid or intercultural basis of transatlantic identity, politics, and aesthetics.
The editors invite English language studies focusing on any area of the long nineteenth century, including (but not limited to) innovative works spanning transatlantic Romantic and Victorian contexts. Manuscripts focusing on European, African, US American, Canadian, Caribbean, Central and South American, and Indigenous literature, art, and culture are welcome. We will consider proposals for monographs, collaborative books, and edited collections.
Co-editors, Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright, explain the background to the series:
'“Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations,” wrote William Blake in America: A Prophecy (1793). This is the space of the transatlantic, defined by incessant motion and against the rising bulwarks of nationalism. It was traversed by millions of people representing a wide cross-section of nineteenth-century society: sailors, migrants, agents of empire, captured Africans, transported criminals (often with their families), political exiles, and tourists from Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Books, songs, pamphlets, and other cultural artifacts circulated along with bodies. Two hundred years after Blake, Paul Gilroy’s ground-breaking book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), revised Western cultural history to address the significance of a coherent “black Atlantic” culture that works aslant dominant Western culture in part by countering the ethnocentric and territorial conceptualization of the modern nation-state. Following Gilroy’s lead, a growing number of scholars are investigating other transatlantic contexts to account for a complex variety of economic, political, cultural, and other material exchanges. The forerunner of postmodern globalization, the transatlantic is ideologically and materially yoked to, even as it challenges, a variety of categories allied with Western modernity. Nineteenth-century transatlantic contexts provide a particularly fascinating area of study, because the period witnessed profound developments in nationalist, imperialist, and counter-discursive activity, the legacies of which are still unfolding today.
A relatively new field of critical inquiry, transatlantic scholarship is still very much in the process of inventing itself. As founding editors of the Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies, we are immensely excited to be involved in this process of invention. We aim to publish a series of innovative, paradigm-shifting monographs and edited collections that are second to none in the field, books that, in responding to nineteenth-century developments, will help to clarify aspects of contemporary literature, history, and culture while also shaping the future of transatlantic studies.'
For more information on how to submit a proposal to this series please contact Ann Donahue, Senior Editor for Literary Studies.