Steaming Across the Pond: Travel, Literary Culture, and the Nineteenth Century Book

"Steaming Across the Pond: Travel, Transatlantic Literary Culture, and the Nineteenth-Century Book," argues that authors and publishers capitalized upon the format of the book to stake claims about British/American relations. Because there was no international copyright law between the two countries until 1891, publishers in one nation could easily reprint texts written in the other with little concern for their original form. In transnational editions, these texts maintained most of their foundational ideas, but when they were reprinted the addition of prefatory materials and even the binding framed and critiqued the author's text creating a fraught discourse within the book itself.

In addition, this project investigates how the nineteenth-century reprint became a site of competing controls where authors, bookworkers, and readers struggled to contribute their own interpretations to texts. The period of reprinting, which was most active from the 1840s through the 1890s, was a moment of active cultural exchange that could not have been possible with the strictures placed on the exchange of ideas by copyright laws passed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

These refurbished editions became sites for the distribution of transatlantic debate. Authors and publishers deliberated upon immigration, slavery, women's rights, labor movements, and the state of America's democratic experiment within their pages. As this transatlantic practice evolved, this project contends, publishers and editors used the reprinted book not only as a site of transatlantic discussion but also as a means of applying the other country's paradigms to their own national problems.

The project begins with a detailed historical and critical overview of nineteenth-century British and American book history and then explores the publication and distribution of four texts that significantly impacted transatlantic relations during the nineteenth century, including Charles Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation, Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas . The dissertation then concludes with a discussion of post-copyright transatlantic relations and the adaptation of reprinting practices by the transatlantic Arts and Crafts movement for both aesthetic and political ends.