Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture ed. by Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins

Reviewed by: Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture ed. by Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins Thomas Smits (bio) Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins, eds. Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. vii + 268, $55.00 paperback. Reading the introduction to Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins's Teaching Transatlanticism, I wished I could have attended their class on transatlantic nineteenth-century print culture in 2010. Luckily their book offers a taste of that experience and more, with an exciting collection of nineteen essays and curricular designs that critically engage with the concept of nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture and present pedagogical methods that confer the benefits of this perspective to students. Why is it important to transcend the disciplinary, and often national, boundaries of literary studies? How can the transatlantic basin as a space help teachers achieve this goal? And what are the effects of digital archives and pedagogies on the field? Teaching Transatlanticism is an essential read for every teacher who hopes to meaningfully address these questions about nineteenth-century print culture. The introduction to the volume begins with a historiographical overview of how the concept of transatlantic literary exchange gained traction in national disciplines in the United States and Britain. Noting the ways in which the conceptualization of British and American literature has been used to enforce national identity, the authors describe how a "more deliberate, self-aware approach to transatlantic studies of literature" emerged in the early 1990s (3). Citing Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright, the authors argue that these studies made clear how particular "transnational subjects . . . resist the interpellative pull of the modern nation-states" (4). However, Hughes and Robbins also note how attention to transatlantic print culture has been at least partly the result of universities' increasing [End Page 437] focus on what can be described as a global vision. Over the last two decades, funding bodies, professional organisations, administrators, and, most importantly, students have become interested in courses that deal with material from a "global, international, or worldly" perspective (5). In response to the increasing interest of students in transcending national borders, the authors describe the graduate seminar they jointly taught at Texas Christian University in the fall of 2010. In a couple of insightful paragraphs, they first explain the temporal focus of this seminar: the nineteenth century. Referring to the work of Benedict Anderson, they note how the emergence of mass-produced print culture in this period not only facilitated national imagined communities but also simultaneously promoted transnational interpretive communities and networks. Second, they discuss the spatial configuration of their seminar: the Atlantic basin, which comprises the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean on one side and Britain on the other. After pointing to the simple fact that these areas share the same language, the authors make the compelling argument that these places were also bound together by an "intense attention to examining social value systems," including discussions of abolition, feminism, labour organisation, and imperialism in which positions on both sides of the Atlantic were often diametrically opposed to each other (8). These discussions constituted one of the central organising principles of their seminar, which enabled them to choose which authors and texts should be of central importance. The volume itself is divided into six parts. The first, "Curricular Histories and Key Trends," begins with an interesting personal history. In "On Not Knowing Any Better," Susan M. Griffin describes how studying literature from an Anglo-American perspective always made perfect sense to her. Despite disciplinary boundaries, writers such as Henry James simply could not be understood without referring to both sides of the Atlantic. Interestingly, other contributors throughout the volume echo this common-sense approach to the concept of transatlanticism. In the afterword, Larissa S. Asaeli, Hughes and Robbins's former student, notes how she always considered herself a "transatlantic reader" (246). The second part of the volume presents several curricular designs for complete courses. Three chapters describing courses on "Transatlantic Romanticism," "Race, Appropriation, and Transatlantic Print Culture," and the "Black Atlantic" amply show how the theme of transatlantic print culture can...

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