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This thesis posits Enlightenment articulations of sympathy, in its capacity for establishing connections and its failures, as an appropriate methodology to articulate transatlantic literary exchange. Focusing on the sympathetic gap, the space sympathy must traverse, this thesis investigates the effect of emigration and place on genre and follows the trajectory from documentary to fictive forms and from a small gap to one unable to be bridged. Because the gap of sympathy is a spatial argument, the distance between is crucial as it indicates relationship. The introduction outlines my argument, with particular attention to transatlantic criticism, what is meant by the gap of sympathy, and the triad of place, emigration and genre. The first chapter discusses how Adam Smith articulated how one person is able to maintain a stable identity and is able to connect with another through imaginative comparison. The chapter establishes the trajectory of sympathy as the gap moves from smallest to unbridgeable, through comparison, sympathy and the failure of sympathy. In a series of case studies, Chapters Two through Five test out Smith’s theories in literary works; they examine the trajectory of transatlantic sympathy, where the gap moves from rhetorically being small to gaping, and moves generically from documentary forms to fiction. Chapter Two uses emigration guides written by British emigrants, who, because of their emigrant status, write from both an American and British perspective. The guides, because of their promotional intent, tend to underplay the gap of sympathy. Although they could be read as documentary and objective, the guides evidence ideological and rhetorical similarities to transatlantic fiction and thus serve as an entrance into the themes and stylistics one tends to associate with literary genres. Chapter Three examines the transatlantic correspondence of the Kerr family. As the Kerr family corresponds transatlantically (separated in space by the Atlantic and in time by more than 50 years), the issue of space becomes paramount to understanding the correspondence as well as if sympathy works in this generic register. Generically, the transatlantic letter is meant to provide virtual presence amid long stretches of absence; it also becomes an analogue for the absent other and the means by which the family may continue to be imagined across the gap of sympathy. Chapter Four examines Susanna Rowson’s transatlantic works, particularly Charlotte Temple, Slaves in Algiers, and Reuben and Rachel. Rowson’s own emigrant experience provides an entrée to the pain of transcultural sympathy that we see most clearly in Reuben and Rachel. Throughout her works Rowson also advocates a sympathy that is active and moral, rather than emotionally vacuous. Reuben and Rachel illustrates the gap of sympathy being bridged most effectively in cross-cultural adaptations and yet finally settles for a sympathy that must acknowledge separation and difference as well. Chapter Five explores the failures of sympathy and sociability present in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels, Wieland and Edgar Huntly. Characters’ frontier locations and claustrophobic versions of sociability, as well generically, the gothic turn and failure of epistolary exchange, signals the moral ambiguity connected with becoming ‘this new man’ of America. Brown’s epistolary fiction briefly considered offers another generic attempt to examine how the gap of sympathy may be bridged and extend beyond the confines of the family. The Afterword points to the total breakdown of sympathy as a turn inward and away from sociability, where the self becomes frantic and frenetic (as evidenced by Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer); it points to some useful applications to the gap of sympathy for transatlantic literary studies.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / <italic>Rough Crossings</italic> investigates the efforts of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Paul Muldoon to read and revise anti-imperial narratives from across the Atlantic. Drawing on transnational, modernist, and post-colonial studies, this dissertation features texts that are themselves bound up with texts from other national literary traditions. In other words, I look carefully at the ways in which these authors are themselves Atlantic readers. In their writing about empire and its local effects on their homelands, these writers find surprising ways to figure the material conditions of colonial contact at specific historical moments while bringing other times and other places to bear on their representations of those circumstances. While redrawing new spaces of belonging, the texts that compose my version of the Atlantic world also map a space imbued with experiences of loss: Ireland's decimated population after the Famine, housing crises for Catholics in Northern Ireland, the dispossession and removal of Native Americans from their lands, and the retreating national border of Mexico after the U.S.-Mexican War. Rather than being simply deferred until a later time, the dislocation of colonial trauma is worked out spatially in these authors' work. These stories take us to another place in addition to another time in order to witness and break out of the traumas of colonial and racial oppression. In substituting for or recovering from the forgotten, repressed, or dislocated blank spaces of traumatic experience, the texts at the heart of this dissertation begin to imagine new transatlantic revisions to the master narratives of empire. Building on the work of Irish Studies scholars like Seamus Deane and Luke Gibbons, and American Studies scholars like Shelley Streeby and Amy Kaplan, the readings I present in my dissertation offer an alternative view of the imperial thrust of American exceptionalism. Instead of viewing the West as the inevitable extension of America's growing empire, I figure the land beyond the frontier as an exceptional site of overlapping metropolitan and colonial spaces with crucial parallels to Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rough Crossings thus brings regional literature into postcolonial discussions that have often struggled to find room for places like Cather's Prairie, Fitzgerald's Middle West, Bret Harte's California, and Muldoon's rural borderlands in Northern Ireland. This dissertation suggests that the contours of these contested spaces are best understood when seen from both sides of the Atlantic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Diplomová práce s názvem Vývoj transatlantických vztahů po 11. září 2001 se zabývá politickými vztahy mezi USA a Evropou v souvislosti s bojem proti terorismu. Autor se zaměřuje zejména na následující témata: historie transatlantických vztahů před 11. zářím 2001; změna globálního bezpečnostního kontextu pro euroatlantické vztahy; odlišné postoje obou partnerů k válce v Iráku; pomoc evropských spojenců při obnově a demokratizačním procesu v Afghánistánu a Iráku; důsledky boje proti terorismu na oblast lidských práv; postoje USA a hlavních evropských spojenců k Evropské bezpečnostní a obranné politice (EBOP) EU; vztah EBOP ? NATO.

Spontaneous feeling has been a cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics since Wordsworth wrote his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This dissertation unsettles the link between Romantic poetry and the overflow of emotion by arguing that writers from Wordsworth to Emerson persistently turned to Stoicism in reconsidering the role of the passions in both literature and the conduct of life. Drawing on poetry and a broad range of journals, letters, and intellectual prose, I argue that the Romantics were attuned to the way diffuse Stoic attitudes informed the politics and moral psychology of their age. More than a prompt for resignation or acquiescence, Stoicism was a radical and controversial term in a revolutionary age; philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, and Godwin drew on Stoic accounts of the passions in articulating their new ethical systems. In chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Emerson, I argue that the period most polemically invested in emotion as the mainspring of art was also captivated by the idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded a transcendence of emotion. In their poetic search for "confirmed tranquillity," the writers in my transatlantic study transformed Stoicism's austerities as they confronted the limitations of sympathy and redefined their own relations to a cosmopolitan and war-torn world.

The following analysis of antislavery poetry evidences the shared language of abolition that incorporated the societal dynamics of law, gender, and race through shared themes of family, the assumed expectation of freedom, and legal references. This thesis focuses upon four women antislavery poets and analyzes their poems and their individual experiences with their sociohistorical contexts. The poems of Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Phillis Wheatley, and Sarah Forten show this shared transatlantic language of abolition.

My dissertation charts the transatlantic nineteenth-century novel's subtle revisions to the traditional marriage plot, in terms of both narrative and form, identifying a gradual shift in the way marriage was fictionalized. I argue that incremental revisions to the marriage plot reconstruct positive representations of female marital experience into negative depictions that transform marriage into a form of institutionalization that leads to psychological and bodily trauma. I reveal the development of a collective trauma narrative that underscores the nineteenth-century woman's experience living inside society's oppressive marital culture. The novel serves as the body of cultural work that both represents and shapes women's marital experiences inside a society that legally forced them to surrender their identity, person, and property to their husband, as well as socially holding them to a much higher standard of propriety and obedience. In specific chapters, I create transatlantic pairings that trace the novel's troubled efforts to free itself and its heroines from the constraints of the marriage plot which reflect women's inability to do so in real life.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation builds on a shift in literary studies as scholars sought to develop new approaches to examining locations in literature. These approaches help scholars address the full spatial dimensions of a narrative, such as architectural features or social constructions of space. I argue that authors use homes to not only meditate on how individuals construct a sense of self, but also to consider the ways individuals interact with their community. I examine works by twentieth and twenty-first-century authors to address four different uses of homes: how homes engage with historical memory, serve as performative spaces, shape experiences of trauma, and address the effects of colonization and diaspora. By addressing different ways homes can be affected and, in turn, affect their occupants, I unpack concerns of housing security and the often-complex relationship between a person and their sense of home. Through a discussion of domestic space, we can further understand how social and political changes affect individual identities and familial structures. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on these authors, as well as develops an interdisciplinary framework for examining space and place in literature by synthesizing spatial theory, architectural theory, and narratology.</p>

“Neighborly Adoption” examines the predominance of adoption narratives in canonical transatlantic novels and highlights their intervention in a relatively unknown and surprisingly contentious discourse on child adoption. In the 1840s and 1850s, American and British reformers, politicians, and authors were thinking through issues surrounding a growing population of abandoned children in metropolitan cities and the flourishing practice and legal codification of private adoption. While institutional care was still on the rise in this period, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Maria Susanna Cummins criticized these methods, endorsing adoption as a more appropriate model of displaced child care. While critics like Carol J. Singley and Mark C. Jerng have read nineteenth-century adoption narratives as commentaries on whom might be included or excluded from national citizenship, I argue that the adoption plot should be understood as a thoroughly transatlantic phenomenon. American and British authors whose novels were popular on both sides of the Atlantic promote and interrogate what I call “neighborly adoption,” a practice in which a local community of individuals or families collectively raise a displaced child. In these narratives, varied members of the neighborhood—single, married, male, female, poor, and rich—have beneficial and empowering relationships with the children in their community, regardless of biological relation to them. Though adoption today is largely associated with individualistic values—i.e. completing one’s family, a child’s best interest—this project reveals the collective interests at the heart of adoption in nineteenth-century transatlantic literature.