Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature

by Christopher Mulvey

Overview

Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travelers writing about their journeys abroad—Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States—during the eighty years following the War of 1812. The writings of travelers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value and that variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of either nation. The impact of such different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters that explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey's text draws on the writings, letters, and reports of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold, and Fanny Trollope among others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521055611
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/21/2008
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.51(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations and sources; Preface; Introduction: 1. The Anglo-American traveller; Part I. American Society: 2. Merchant society; 3. Planter society; 4. Western man; 5. American woman; 6. The slave; 7. The uniformity of American life; Part II. English Society: 8. The English gentleman; 9. The aristocracy; 10. The social hierarchy; 11. Servants; 12. The poor; 13. The narrowness of English life; Conclusion: 14. An Anglo-Saxon light; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Mulvey's own insights are genuinely illuminating." Janis P. Stout, American Literature

From the Publisher