The Traffic In Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange

The transatlantic crossing of people and goods shaped nineteenth-century poetry in surprising ways that cannot be fully understood through the study of separate national literary traditions. American and British poetic cultures were bound by fascination, envy, influence, rivalry, recognition, and piracy, as well as by mutual fantasies about and competition over the Caribbean.

Drawing on examples such as Felicia Hemans's elaboration of the foundational American myth of Plymouth Rock, Emma Lazarus's ambivalent welcome of Europe's cast-off populations, black abolitionist Mary Webb's European performances of Hiawatha, and American reprints of Robert Browning and George Meredith, the eleven essays in this book focus on poetic depictions of exile, slavery, immigration, and citizenship and explore the often asymmetrical traffic between British and American poetic cultures.

• Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings
• Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Penguin Classics)
• The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
• The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text
• Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Penguin Classics)
• Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems
• The Pioneers (Leatherstocking Tale)
• A New-England Tale (Penguin Classics)
• On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History, & the Contemporary)
• A History of New York (Penguin Classics)