Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815-1835

by Cynthia Schoolar Williams

Overview

Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815-1835 argues that a select group of late-Romantic English and American writers disrupted national tropes by reclaiming their countries' shared historical identification with hospitality. In doing so, they reimagined the spaces of encounter: the city, the coast of England, and the Atlantic itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349464685
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	05/15/2014
Series:	The New Urban Atlantic
Edition description:	1st ed. 2014
Pages:	235
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Cynthia Schoolar Williams is Instructor in the Deptartment of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Keeping Hospitality 2. Mary Shelley at the Threshold: Displacement and Form in Lodore 3. A Sailor's Welcome: James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot and Hospitality in the Coastal Zone 4. Washington Irving and the Citizen as Guest 5. England as Centrifuge: Felicia Hemans and the Threshold Foreclosed

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

''We do not know what hospitality is,' Jacques Derrida once said. Yet, in Cynthia Schoolar Williams' competent hands, this non-knowledge proves to be exceptionally generative. Succinct and intellectually agile, her book traces the frisson of threshold experiences activating and connecting the work of a range of Romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Through a series of intelligent readings, Williams demonstrates that thresholds are wholly fraught spaces, at once scenes of alienation, intimacy, and possibility. Her book explores what it means hospitably to encounter a stranger and to be encountered as a stranger including a stranger to oneself. She gives us a robust language with which to consider the fierce vicissitudes of nineteenth-century forms of welcoming and belonging in whose wake we continue to struggle." - David L. Clark, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Canada

Editorial Reviews

'...by gathering what may seem at first glance to be an unusual variety of topics and authors, Williams makes an original contribution to this growing sub-field... sensitive, probing readings.' Evan Gottlieb, The BARS Review

From the Publisher