The Traffic in Poems

Price: $24.95  

Subtitle: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange
Edited by: Meredith L. McGill
Subject: Literary Studies / American Studies
Paper ISBN 978-0-8135-4230-0
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8135-4229-4
Pages: 272 pages, 12 b&w illustrations
Publication Date: February 2008

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The transatlantic crossing of people and goods shaped nineteenth-century poetry in surprising ways that cannot be fully understood through the study of separate national literary traditions. American and British poetic cultures were bound by fascination, envy, influence, rivalry, recognition, and piracy, as well as by mutual fantasies about and competition over the Caribbean.

Drawing on examples such as Felicia Hemans’s elaboration of the foundational American myth of Plymouth Rock, Emma Lazarus’s ambivalent welcome of Europe’s cast-off populations, black abolitionist Mary Webb’s European performances of Hiawatha, and American reprints of Robert Browning and George Meredith, the eleven essays in this book focus on poetic depictions of exile, slavery, immigration, and citizenship and explore the often asymmetrical traffic between British and American poetic cultures. 

Meredith L. McGill is a professor of English at Rutgers University.