Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (review)

In their introduction to Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor lament the fact that "comparative practice in transatlantic literary studies has to date been relatively unreflective about its methods and assumptions" and offer their ambitious and groundbreaking collection in an attempt to address this theoretical oversight (5). Indeed, many authors that claim a transatlantic framework say little about their motivations for using such a theoretical approach and take for granted that the audience shares their assumptions about the nature and function of transatlantic relations. Keeping this in mind, Manning and Taylor organize their reader thematically into six parts, which represent the various discourses that have contributed, whether directly or indirectly, to the field of transatlantic literary studies: "The Nation and Cosmopolitanism"; "Theories and Practice of Comparative Literature"; "Imperialism and the Postcolonial"; "Translation"; "Style and Genre"; and "Travel." Each section includes canonical texts and lesser-known works that exemplify the variety of methods scholars have used to define and alter the parameters of transatlantic thought and debate.

"The transatlantic literary space," Manning and Taylor propose, "represents the textual collision of the 'integral' nation and those forces—material, ideological or aesthetic—that resist or distort the authority of the national imaginary" (6). Although the term "transatlantic" suggests an alternate framework for the study of literature to that of the national literature or area studies, it also provides a contact zone of sorts for multiple nations, whose cohesiveness it aims to challenge. In "The Nation and Cosmopolitanism" section, readers will find an articulation of the multiplicity of transatlantic encounters in Amy Kaplan and Nina Gerassi-Navarro's essay "Between Empires: Frances Calderón de la Barca's Life in Mexico." Here they suggest that "triangulation" should be the model for transatlantic studies, given the latter's propensity to focus on European-U.S. relations and to overlook Spanish–Spanish American and inter-American ones. The next section, "Theories and Practice of Comparative Literature," stands in stark contrast to this last essay, as it replicates the paradigm that Kaplan and Gerassi-Navarro challenge by focusing primarily on European-U.S. relations, especially in terms of romanticism and transcendentalist thought. Despite its geographical concentration, this second section provides useful conceptualizations of metaphor, networks, and cultural time that have the potential for translatability to different transatlantic contexts.

The third slate of essays listed under "Imperialism and the Postcolonial" delivers a particularly strong lineup. The juxtaposition of Peter Hulme's "Prospero and Caliban," Stuart Hall's "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," and Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity" provides the basis for a meaningful conversation about the relation between discourse, ethnicity, and nation in a transatlantic space. Readers will find the selection from Gilroy's work on the black Atlantic helpful, as it supplies a more concrete conceptualization of the transatlantic. In his work, Gilroy posits the ship, especially the slave ship, as "the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world were joined. [Ships] were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected. Accordingly, they need to be thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments of the triangular trade" (146). Along with the transatlantic figure of the ship, two other key theoretical concepts emerge from this section: the notion of "cultural contagion" (158) as an alternative unifying principle for nation/empire as proposed by James Snead and Wai Chee Dimock's theory of deep time, or "denationalized space" (160).

The final three sections of the collection cover the relation between language and national identity, or how "language both constructs the nation as a discursive space and works to disrupt its imagined consistency" (167), through an examination of translation, style, genre, exile, the nature/culture divide, and travel writing. Highlights include Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," Lori Chamberlain's "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," Eric Cheyfitz's...