Transatlantic R omanticism

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson asked in his introduction to Nature , ‘Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?’ More than a generation following the American Revolution, as Emerson indicates, Americans continued to live in the shadow of English culture. The frustration felt by American Romantic authors was exacerbated by the lack of international copyright law. Edgar Allan Poe points out in ‘Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison‐House’ that American magazine editors had little incentive to pay domestic writers for their works when American culture had succumbed to arguments for ‘the beauty and conveniency of robbing the Literary Europe on the highway’ (1845: 104). American writers felt little to no support from their American audiences, and the problem was compounded by the proliferation of British reprints. The inundation of British literature resulted in the idea of a transatlantic exchange becoming a transatlantic strangulation of the domestic literary market from the American perspective. Because of this economic situation in the novel market, American writers mostly opted for the short story, which could be published in the magazines. Only Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper proved the exceptions to this rule. The British market created a demand for their writings, which, ironically, secured their reputations – and sales – in America. However, not even Irving and Cooper could quell the general British antipathy towards American letters. For example, Sydney Smith, writing for the Edinburgh Review in 1820, asserted,‘During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the Arts, for Literature, or even for the statesman‐like studies of Politics or Political Economy’ (ffrench 1952: 43). Despite these transatlantic tensions, Romantic prose flourished in America and Britain during the early nineteenth century as writers tried a variety of writing types to address the rapidly changing aesthetic, social, political, and economic factors resulting from the close yet contested ties of transatlantic exchange.