Transatlantic Literary Studies

Was Edgar Allan Poe's work vulgar or a «new specimen of beauty»? Did he represent a critical puzzle for his influential readers or a basis for redefining American literature? This book offers a new understanding of Poe's literary significance by considering the transatlantic reception of the author in French translation.
The translation of Poe into French by Charles Baudelaire ennobled Poe aesthetically and catalysed a wave of critical responses to his work across the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. Readings by T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Aldous Huxley here become the focus of transatlantic analysis.
Contrastive close readings of key essays in which these Anglophone writers engaged with the French Poe set out to achieve two things: first, they shed new light on the constitution of Poe's commanding critical reputation; secondly, they test comparative methodology as the primary tool of transatlantic enquiry. Situated within an expanding body of Poe scholarship but atypical in design, this book promises to bring about unexpected insights by systematically relating and comparing French and Anglophone discourses.

The Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) and the Finnish Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg (1857-1913), both active women’s rights advocates who toured in the United States in the 1850s and 1880s, respectively, used their travel writing as a powerful medium in promoting their ideological agendas. They articulated their gender politics through presenting American women as pioneers, leaders in women’s suffrage and models of female emancipation. Women’s activism in America was perceptible not only in the formally organized women’s rights movement but also in various reform movements (abolitionism, temperance, and labor movements) that contributed to women’s suffrage on a worldwide scale. As the century progressed, the women’s rights movement grew into an international collaboration of people and associations dedicated to a common cause. The travel writing of Bremer and Gripenberg offers a view of the century plagued by anxieties about gender, while it serves to advance the writer’s ideological beliefs. Thus, in addition to using fictional works and journalism to advance women’s causes, Bremer and Gripenberg instrumentalized their travels as they addressed their audience of like-minded women in their own countries—as well as abroad—informing, influencing, and empowering them. Indeed, as scholar Jennifer Steadman suggests, “representations of female travellers, like their travel texts, were gaining larger audience and were therefore impacting cultural ideas about women, travel, national identity, and citizenship” (60). It can be argued that following the model set by the “emancipated ladies” of America, women’s rights advocates in Europe, like Bremer and Gripenberg, together with international women’s associations whose concern was women’s strive for independence, contributed to a universal suffrage reform in such countries as Finland, leading women towards inclusion in full citizenship.

Call for Papers
Globalized Peripheries
New Approaches to the Atlantic World 1680–1850
Date: July 5th–7th, 2018
Place: European University Viadrina
(Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany)

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• The exchange and movement of goods and people across
the oceans
• Merchants and merchant networks
• Consumption and material culture
• (Proto-)Industrial production and development
• Theories of political economy
• (Religious) Minorities as agents of trade
• Gender from a global perspective
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to “Atlantic
History” and/or “centers” and “peripheries”
Although the conference has no specific regional focus, we explicitly invite papers focused on the following “peripheries” of the Atlantic World and/or its historiography:
• Central and Eastern Europe
• West and West Central Africa
• South Asia

Proposals of ca. 300 words as well as a short CV (max. 1 page) should be sent to: globalized-peripheries@europa-uni.de
by October 15th, 2017.

We only accept proposals sent electronically to this e-mail address. Feel free to contact us at this address should you have any further questions. Please also indicate if you would like us to consider your proposal for publication.
We look forward to receiving your proposals!
Klaus Weber, Jutta Wimmler, Anka Steffen & Torsten dos Santos Arnold
www.kuwi.europa-uni.de/globalized-peripheries