The constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere and a transnational urban imaginary, influencing national and international cultural and political intersections and innovations. The contributors in Urban Identity and the Atlantic World explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness was integrated into the more cosmopolitan and transnational creation of an Atlantic public sphere. Wide-ranging, this volume brings together research using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from social history to literary studies, and from indigenous studies and Africana studies to theatre history.

In essays that examine particular non-canonical works and writers in their wider cultural context, this volume "repopulates" the German Enlightenment. German literature and thought flourished in the eighteenth century, when a culture considered a European backwater came to assert worldwide significance. This was an age in which repeated attempts to reform German literary and philosophical culture were made - often only to be overtaken within a few decades. It ushered in generations of exceptionally gifted poets and thinkers including Klopstock, Lessing, Goethe, Kant, and Schiller, whose names still dominate our understanding of the German Enlightenment. Yet the period also brought with it new means of accessing and disseminating culture and a rapid increase in cultural production. The leading lights of eighteenth-century German culture operated against the backdrop of a yet more diverse and vivid cast of literary and philosophical figures since consigned to the second tier of German culture. Through essays that examine particular non-canonical works and writers in their wider cultural context, this collection repopulates the German Enlightenment with these largely forgotten movements, writers, and literary circles. It offers new insights into the development of genres such as thenovel, the fable, and the historical drama, and assesses the dynamics that led to individual authors, circles, and schools of thought being left behind in their time and passed over or inadequately understood to this day. Contributors: Johannes Birgfeld, Stephanie Blum, Julia Bohnengel, Kristin Eichhorn, Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, Jonathan Blake Fine, J. C. Lees, Leonard von Morze, Ellen Pilsworth, Joanna Raisbeck, Ritchie Robertson, Michael Wood. Michael Wood is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in German at the University of Edinburgh. Johannes Birgfeld teaches Modern German Literature at the University of the Saarland.

This book provides a much-needed comparative approach to the history of cities by investigating the dissemination of cultural forms between cities of the Atlantic world. The contributors attend to the various forms and norms of cultural representation in Atlantic history, examining a wealth of diverse topics such as the Portuguese Atlantic; the Spanish Empire; Guy Fawkes and the conspiratorial rhetoric of slaves; Albert-Charles Wulffleff and the Parc-Musee of Dakar; and the writings of Jane Austen, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin, and others. By interpreting Atlantic urban history through sustained attention to customs and representational forms, an international group of nine contributors demonstrate the power of culture in the making of Atlantic urban experience, even as they acknowledge the harsh realities of economic history.

The constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere. Chapters explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness influenced national and international cultural and political intersections.