Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance

Analyses Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson against the background of Anglo-American print culture and oral performance

Develops a new analytical framework for the study of nineteenth-century transatlantic writing that combines literary studies, book history and cultural sociology

Reframes canonical works through unfamiliar texts and contexts

Draws on a rich body of archival sources and historical periodical publications

Offers an in-depth account of nineteenth-century Anglo-American print culture and the transatlantic lecture system

Examining the transatlantic writings and professional careers of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this book explores the impact of literary, cultural, political and legal manifestations of authority on nineteenth-century British and American writing, publishing and lecturing. Drawing on primary texts in conjunction with a rich body of archival sources, this study retraces Romantic debates about race and nationhood, analyses the relationship between cultural nationalism and literary historiography and sheds light on Carlyle’s and Emerson’s professional identities as publishing authors and lecturing celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Reviews of Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority: Literature, Print, Performance

"Emerson and Carlyle were an odd couple and a transatlantic cultural powerhouse. Their decades-long exchange electrified literary circuits and jolted thinking about historiography, race, nationhood, copyright and lecturing, as Tim Sommer shows. This shrewd study of the nineteenth century's alternating currents of cultural authority snaps and crackles with insights." -Mich le Mendelssohn, Oxford University