Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
7-2019
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Abstract
Transoceanic America offers a new approach to American literature by emphasizing the material and conceptual interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. These oceans were tied together economically, textually, and politically, through such genres as maritime travel writing, mathematical and navigational schoolbooks, and the relatively new genre of the novel.
Especially during the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long-distance transoceanic travel required calculating and managing risk in the interest of profit. The result was the emergence of a newly suspenseful form of narrative that came to characterize capitalist investment, political revolution, and novelistic plot. The calculus of risk that drove this expectationist narrative also concealed violence against vulnerable bodies on ships and shorelines around the world. A transoceanic American literary and cultural history requires new non-linear narratives to tell the story of this global context and to recognize its often forgotten textual archive.
Chapter of
Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific
Part of
Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Recommended Citation
Burnham, M. (2019). Introduction: Transoceanic America. In Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific (pp. 1–20). Oxford University Press.
Comments
This material was originally published in Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific by Michelle Burnham, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/rights/permissions.