Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835

Nation and Migration explores the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture, moving beyond traditional studies of transatlantic literature that focus on what Stephen Spender has described as the "love-hate relations" between the United States and England. By allowing England to stand in for the British archipelago, Juliet Shields argues, recent literary scholarship has oversimplified the processes through which the new United States differentiated itself culturally from Britain and underestimated the impact of migration on British nation formation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.In short, Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants brought with them to the American colonies and early republic stories and traditions very different from those shared by English settlers. Americans looked to these stories for narratives of cultural and racial origins through which to legitimate their new nation. Writers situated in Britain's Celtic peripheries in turn drew on American discourses of rights and liberties to assert the cultural independence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from the English imperial center. The stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the tenuousness and fragility of Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities. These stories illustrate the dialectial relationship between nation and migration.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Decentering Transatlantic Literary Studies Chapter One: From English Empire to British Atlantic World Chapter Two: The Irish Uncanny and the American Gothic Chapter Three: Scots and Scott in the Early Republic Chapter Four: Wales and the American West Chapter Five: The Literary Sketch and British Atlantic Regionalism Conclusion: British Atlantic Worlds: Anglo-American, Colonial, and Archipelagic Bibliography

About the Author :
Juliet Shields is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820.

Review :
"Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to our recognition of how regionalism continued to be a force both in Britain and in North America during the early national period. ... Shields's charting of the unfolding of archipelagic British literatures "in dialectical relation to their American counterparts" (127) adds an important dimension to our understanding of the transatlantic cultural matrix at the turn of the nineteenth century." --Paul Giles, Modern Language Quarterly "Shields's approach-eschewing "the nation-state as a primary or natural unit of analysis while nonetheless acknowledging its long-standing role in organizing literary study" (139)-and her focus on microgeographies result in a lucid study of Romantic-era literature that tests and displaces conventional geographical and genre boundaries. Nation and Migration is a welcome contribution to a field of study that keeps revealing important literary and critical spaces." --Michael Wiley, Modern Philology "The new field of Atlantic studies (or study of the British Atlantic world) has so far relied mainly on a binary of Great Britain and America. Shields (Univ. of Washington) looks in a more fine-grained way at stories about (if not by) Irish, Scots, and Welsh immigrants to America....Shields's illuminating readings show that all the myths contributed- though often in quite different, even contradictory ways- both to an emerging American identity and to the creation of self-conscious regional identities in Britain itself. An excellent final chapter relates ethnic identity to the emergence of the new genre of the literary "sketch."" --D. L. Patey, CHOICE "The map of transatlantic influence shifts and strains as Shields takes an international and regional approach to nation formation. 'Britain' is appropriately interrogated as Welsh, Scottish and Irish, with each region turning out to be uniquely defined and defining in its expanded context. This is an appropriately adventurous book that ranges widely among authors and makes connections on which others will surely build."-- Caroline McCracken-Flesher, author of The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders "Juliet Shields convincingly remaps the British Atlantic, demonstrating how the cultural and literary exchanges between Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and America profoundly shaped the contours of their respective national identities. Vigorously argued, Nation and Migration is a compelling guide out of the binary opposition of England and America in turn of the nineteenth century literary study and will be necessary reading for those working on the British Atlantic world." -- Justine S. Murison, author of The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature "Nation and Migration offers readings of a wide and illuminating range of texts, some familiar, some new, and in doing so provides a very welcome corrective to over-simplified notions of the Britain (and British Literature) against which the United States formed its emergent identity, literary and otherwise. Its thorough-going commitment to decentering Anglo-American literary studies pays rich dividends in terms of our understanding the various and varied literatures that made up the British and Anglo-American Atlantic worlds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." -- Dafydd Moore, author of Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson's the Poems of Ossian: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change