ISBN : 9780198840893
Transoceanic America offers a new approach to American literature by emphasizing the material and conceptual interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. These oceans were tied together economically, textually, and politically, through such genres as maritime travel writing, mathematical and navigational schoolbooks, and the relatively new genre of the novel. Especially during the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long-distance transoceanic travel required calculating and managing risk in the interest of profit. The result was the emergence of a newly suspenseful form of narrative that came to characterize capitalist investment, political revolution, and novelistic plot. The calculus of risk that drove this expectationist narrative also concealed violence against vulnerable bodies on ships and shorelines around the world. A transoceanic American literary and cultural history requires new non-linear narratives to tell the story of this global context and to recognize its often forgotten textual archive.
Preface
Introduction: Transoceanic America
Part One: Connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic
1 Narrative: Trade and Time in Early Pacific Travel Writing
2 Numbers: Calculation and Speculation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
3 Politics: Violence and Gender in the Revolutionary Pacific
4 Circles: Seduction and Rebellion in The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman
5 Coils: Global Politics and Economic Futurity in Ormond
6 Cycles: Atlantic Slavery and Pacific Botany in Obi
7 Circuits: Female Bodies and Capitalist Drive in Secret History
Epilogue: Towards a Transoceanic American Literary History