The wealth of transatlantic scholarship to emerge in recent years
has greatly enriched our understanding of the mutual, far-reaching
cultural exchange between Great Britain and the United States. Yet
scholars often lose sight of this relationship in the years
immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Drawing on
a capacious array of travel narratives, novels, poems, political
scuffles, and more, Christopher Hanlon's innovative study examines
the patterns of affiliation through which U.S. culture encoded the
turmoil of antebellum America in terms of imagined connections with
England. Through engagement with contemporaneous renditions of
English race, history, landscape aesthetics, telecommunications,
and economic discourse, America's England reveals how Northern and
Southern partisans re-imagined the terms behind their antagonisms,
forming a transatlantic surround for the otherwise cisatlantic
political struggles that would dissolve the Union in 1861. Among
other ramifications, the re-conceptualization of sectional issues
in transatlantic terms undermined the notion that white citizens of
the United States formed a unified biological or cultural
community, effectively polarizing the imagined ethnic and cultural
bases of the American polity. But beyond that, a continued
reference to English historical, cultural, and political formations
allowed figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass,
Henry Timrod, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles
Sumner, and others to situate an era of developing national
acrimony along longer historical and transnational curves, forming
accounts of national crisis that situated questions of a domestic
political bearing at oceanic removes from Northern and Southern
combatants. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies,
and economics shaped the sectional crisis for antebellum Americans
on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, America's England locates the key
crisis points of the period in a broader transatlantic
constellation that provided distinctive circumstances for literary
production.
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