Author Description
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.
Menrva's Summary
THE THESIS
This book investigates how the material and conceptual interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans shaped the development of American literature and narrative forms during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Michelle Burnham, a scholar of early American literature, utilizes a framework that links maritime travel, economic risk management, and the emergence of the novel. She argues that the capitalist drive to calculate and mitigate risk during the Age of Revolutions created a specific type of suspenseful narrative that simultaneously obscured the violence inflicted upon vulnerable populations in global maritime spaces.
THE SCOPE MAP
What You Will Find
- Analysis of maritime travel writing and navigational schoolbooks as literary precursors.
- Examination of the relationship between capitalist investment and novelistic plot structures.
- Exploration of the 'expectationist' narrative mode in early American texts.
Scope Limits
- The study focuses primarily on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
- It does not provide a comprehensive history of all American maritime literature, focusing instead on the specific intersection of risk, capital, and global connectivity.
THE AUTHORITY PERSPECTIVE
Scholars in the field of early American studies recognize this work as a significant contribution to the 'transoceanic' turn in literary history. Experts frequently highlight the author's ability to bridge the gap between economic history and narrative theory to reveal the hidden costs of early global capitalism.
Page Count:
304
Publication Date:
2019-01-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0192577581
ISBN-13:
9780192577580
Cultural History
American
History of Capitalism
Literary Criticism
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