Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century

Innovative and multidisciplinary, this collection of essays marks out the future of Atlantic Studies, making visible the emphases and purposes now emerging within this vital comparative field. The contributors model new ways to understand the unexpected roles that seduction stories and sentimental narratives played for readers struggling to negotiate previously unimagined differences between and among people, institutions, and ideas.

"The essays work together to highlight both the continuities between the sorts of epistemological questions being raised in different parts of the Atlantic world and the varied approaches taken to answering and exploring them. Bowers and Chico are opening up some large and complicated scholarly questions through the ways in which they frame this volume." - Critique de Livres

"Bowers (Univ. of Pennsylvania) and Chico (Univ. of Maryland) assemble and introduce a thought-provoking collection of scholarship on the long 18th century. The essays are wide-ranging, and the titular umbrella that covers them is correspondingly large, but this breadth is a strength rather than a weakness. The scholarship is uniformly good, and an eclectic group of essays on a broad topic is preferable to an uneven-because-overspecialized collection. Notable in the collection: Jayne Elizabeth Lewis on Henry Fielding and the changed perception of witchcraft - scary in the 16th and 17th centuries and idle superstition in the early 18th, witchcraft was made sad and even sentimental by sensibility; Gideon Mailer and Karen Collis, who argue for Susanna Rowson's authorial claim on the literary conventions of evangelical narrative, as against aesthetic appeals; Melissa Sanchez showing how Andrew Marvell highlights lesbian and other queer sexualities to demonstrate the loss of liberty inherent in the ideal of domestic masculinity. Summing Up: Recommended." - Choice

"This volume shows us the Atlantic World as a place where narratives of seduction and sentiment are not antagonistic, but on the contrary deeply intertwined. The eclectic nature of the narratives shows a variety of themes within the Atlantic World which apprehend the latter as a place where representations of sentiment and seduction of different nations and worlds constantly merged." - Sehepunkte

'In this invaluable collection, each essay demonstrates how rich yet diverse was the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century circum-Atlantic world. Together these essays bring to light the twin issues of seduction and sentiment as the obsessive concern of novels, travel accounts, historical narratives, gossip, history, newspaper reports, and theatrical productions, to name only a few of the many genres discussed. Challenging the old Atlantic narratives, this collection for the first time opens the question as to why the Atlantic world should have been the unique site where seduction and sentiment came together both in shaping the New World and in remapping the social geography of the Old.' - Len Tennenhouse, Duke University

'This collection of essays is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of Atlantic Studies, confirming imaginative literature's central role in the ongoing project of rethinking nation-based cultural history. Collectively, these essays challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries defined by the nation-state, moving beyond rubrics such as 'early American literature,' to explore the ways in which these narratives of sentiment, seduction, and adultery were appropriated as they traversed geographical regions, were repackaged in various genres, and adapted to and repurposed within local contexts of the north Atlantic world.' - Beth Tobin, University of Georgia

Toni Bowers is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tita Chico is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland.