The impossibility of being Anglo-American: The rhetoric of emigration and transatlanticism in British romantic culture, 1791-1833

Abstract

This essay offers a brief survey of the history of British emigration literature, focusing particularly on English representations of transatlanticism in texts by Coleridge, Wollstonecraft, Campbell, Barbauld, Shelley, Keats, Rowson, Imlay, and Trollope. The essay traces evolving themes within Romantic emigration literature, with particular attention to the ways in which these works perform a refusal of transatlantic identity. The central argument proposes that English Romantic responses to transatlantic emigration are characterized by a rhetorical rejection of hybrid nationalism and that the impossibility of being Anglo-American has helped to shape definitions of Romanticism along exclusive national boundaries since the 1790s.