Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright, eds., Transatlantic Literary Exchanges 1790-1870. Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 226. £60. ISBN: 9781409409533.

The systematic engagement with cultural, economic, military, and political interrelations across the physical and fictional space of the Atlantic is an interdisciplinary field of research still in formation. Published in a book series dedicated to shaping this development, Transatlantic Literary Exchanges is a worthy contribution to that conversation and the chapters individually point in directions worthy of further pursuit. The series launched in 2008 with The Atlantic Enlightenment (ed. Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano) and has to date published fourteen volumes, together representing an impressive array of how Atlantic Studies has reinvented itself as Transatlantic Studies in the wake of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. Transatlantic Literary Exchanges focuses on gender, sexuality and race; categories of difference all too familiar in literary scholarship since the late twentieth century, but it strikes a successful balance between existing research and taking new perspectives on well-known terrain. Although the individual chapters deal with very different genres, subjects and cultural locations, each chapter stands on its own; the idea of intersecting various transatlantic crossings with such categories of difference ultimately provides coherence and productive, sometimes unexpected synergies.

The volume groups its nine chapters in three parts that add structure and support this coherence. Part 1 sketches perspectives on the intersections between transatlantic mobility and gender (or sexuality) with readings on Charlotte Turner Smith's The Old Manor House (1793) and Anna Brownell Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), and a comparative reading of Felicia Hemans' The Forest Sanctuary (1825) with Herman Melville's 'The Paradise of Batchelors and the Tartarus of Maids'(1855). The first two essays deal with the political crisis after the American War of Independence in the tension between Britain's imperial military project and a nostalgic sense of 'national domesticity' (Jared Richman) and the New World as an imaginary space in which British identity as an imperial power and European aesthetic theory are reconfigured along the lines of gender (Charity Matthews). In a very different vein, Daniel Hannah's chapter provides an insightful and provocative reading of Hemans' narrative poem alongside Melville's diptych to examine 'the complicated interrelations of desire and displacement that sometimes structured the nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary' (61). Incorporating ecofeminist and queer readings of transatlantic literary relations, this section most distinctly fulfills the volume's promise of freshness.

Part 2 then turns to issues of race, engaging literature with history and political writing. Tim Fulford looks at Robert Southey's epic poem Madoc (1805) in the context of Native American cultural expression, empire and religion. Bridget Bennett revisits the concept of the 'color line', tracing it through Frederick Douglass's conceptual movement across the Atlantic and his experience as African American abolitionist travelling in Britain. Sarah H. Ficke analyzes three adventure novels in terms of British anxieties over race and national identity. The concluding Part 3 deals with transatlantic print culture, tourism and political thought. The operative term that holds this part together is 'exchange', and though its internal coherence is somewhat loose, each of the chapters here speaks back to earlier sections in suggestive ways. For example, Kevin Hutching's analysis of tourist discourse around Niagara speaks to Charity Matthews reading of how the engagement with the natural environment and aesthetics came together to rethink gender and nation; Eve Tavor Bannet's chapter on the transatlantic role of the popular Minerva Press highlights issues of genre relevant to earlier chapters engaged with transatlantic print culture; Wil Verhoven's exploration of Charles Brockden Brown's 'geopolitical' writing provides an - albeit paradigmatic - historical contextualization for the volume as a whole.

The book sets out as a contribution to nineteenth-century transatlantic studies, engaging in particular with crossings between Canada, Britain and the United States. This focus on the Northern Atlantic is also its limitation, since it keeps the interdisciplinary exchange largely within English departments, even if they are themselves located across the Atlantic in the US, the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands. Yet its omissions may be just as important in triggering further research as its inclusions, and some of the chapters already point towards such work. The inclusion of Frederick Douglass's work calls for a more extensive engagement with his relation to Africa; the inclusion of Michel Maxwell Philip's Emmanuel Appadocca (1954) invokes more sustained attention to connections with South America; the inclusion of the Queer Atlantic may suggest an extension of the timeframe to, for example, include poets who responded to Whitman in different languages; the inclusion of black pirates opens the door to work done on the Atlantic itself not just as a space to be crossed but as an awe-inspiring, fluid meeting place.

Jeanne Cortiel, Universität Bayreuth