It is hard to deny the enormous impact of Wordsworth's writing upon the literary and cultural world that followed him. This new collection of specially-commissioned essays provides the most complete picture yet to be produced of the influence of William Wordsworth's writing upon major American writers of the nineteenth century, such as Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson and others. In addition to providing a thorough account of Wordsworth's influence on American literature, this collection also seeks to address the poet's influence on American culture, from religious reform to civic humanism, and in so doing hints at a new theory of transatlantic influence that accounts for transnational literary as well as cultural exchange. Contributors include James Butler, Elizabeth Fay, Stephen Gill, Susan Manning and Adam Potkay, amongst others.
'A highly enjoyable and scholarly gathering of essays exploring some of Wordsworth's multiple American afterlives. This book reveals with new clarity an absorbing story of transpositions and transformations, an extraordinarily multifarious influence felt throughout a culture, from Whitman and Dickinson, Thoreau and William James, to cowboy stories and gothic tales. Whatever generalisations we may have entertained before about Wordsworth's place in nineteenth century America, we shall have to think again now.' - Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford, UK
'This volume is a valuable addition to the growing body of work on the transatlantic dimensions of Romanticism...Pace and Scott can justly claim to have provided 'a more thorough examination of nineteenth-century America's Wordsworth than has ever been undertaken'' - Robin Jarvis, University of the West of England
'Wordsworth in American Literary Culture... provide[s] an important and much needed reassessment of transatlantic influence narratives by offering alternative ways of thinking about the impact of Wordsworth's literary power in American culture... In collecting scholars on either side of the Atlantic and specialists in American literature and British Romanticism, the editors of this book not only initiate an important transatlantic dialogue that encourages academics to investigate Wordsworth's broad legacy in American Romanticism, but also offer further possibilities for re-energizing and re-directing transatlantic studies.' - Sohui Lee, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations
