Books Between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620-1860 ed. by Leslie Howsam and James Raven (review)
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Howsam and Raven's edited collection provides an ambitious look at transatlantic publishing practices over the course of two centuries, making a significant contribution to the history of both publishing and transatlantic studies. The strength of the volume is its breadth and depth of inquiry as well as the ways in which the essays complement and converse with each other.
The chapters covering the nineteenth century include Sandra Guardini T. Vasconcelos's examination of the influence of British texts on the development of the Brazilian novel, Eugenia Roldán Vera's essay on the exchange of information about the monitorial system of education between Spanish American and European countries, Aileen Fyfe's chapter covering the way in which the W. R. Chambers firm extended its business into the United States, and Robert J. Scholnick's discussion of the anti-slavery communications between Britain and the United States. While all of these essays mention the importance of periodicals, the latter two focus on the influence of periodicals in transatlantic publishing and will be of special interest to VPR readers.
In particular, Fyfe's chapter on W. R. Chambers details the challenges the company faced as it sought to expand its influence in the United States, including everything from import taxes to reprinting, all while doing business with distant partners. Fyfe shows that though Chambers was unwilling to sell the plates for serials, the firm's journals and books circulated the country in a myriad of ways, from the officially sanctioned to the completely pirated. She also explores the challenges inherent in importing periodicals from Britain to the United States and argues that one of the most important issues at stake was how to transform and market Chambers's products for an American audience.
Scholnick's chapter examines both the mechanics of publishing transatlantically and the influence of transatlantic publications on public opinion about abolition. Much of this essay focuses on the Living Age, an American periodical that consisted primarily of pieces taken from British periodicals. Scholnick convincingly argues that because of the demand for British [End Page 571] periodicals in the United States, British authors were aware that they were addressing a transatlantic audience when they wrote. Scholnick also demonstrates how British anti-slavery sentiment transformed the landscape of American thought by appealing to American intellectuals to stand up for their anti-slavery convictions.
Overall, Books Between Europe and the Americas is an important work on transatlantic print culture. Although the text covers much more than nineteenth-century periodicals, it is a valuable resource for anyone working on the Victorian period and periodical studies.
Kristin N. Huston is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, where she teaches composition and literature classes. Her dissertation focuses on the study of representations of Creole women in nineteenth-century periodicals published in Jamaica and Louisiana. She is co-editor of Transatlantic Sensations (Ashgate, 2012).
