Explore the vast range of titles available.

This essay examines three “American” magazines published in mid-nineteenth-century London: the American Miscellany (1839–40), the Great Western (1842), and the American Magazine (1851–52). These magazines staged a fantasy of a unified, national and white American culture that regional print cultures and sectional tensions over slavery rendered impossible within the United States itself. They fashioned this fantasy through dialogue with Yankee comedy (an American form constructed through transatlantic circulation); through the theatricality, materiality and composite form of the magazine; and by transforming regional texts into national culture through transatlantic reprinting. Through histories of these magazines, this essay theorizes magazine reprinting as performance, arguing that performance theory helps to conceptualize transatlantic reprinting and its cultural work, and to understand why these magazines ultimately failed as organs of national culture. Additionally, it suggests that magazines published outside the United States illuminate the relationship between periodical circulation and the development of American nationhood in the antebellum era.

Melville was an important influence on the British-Canadian writer Malcolm Lowry, best known for his novel Under the Volcano (1947). Lowry’s letters reveal both his fascination with Melville, and his anxious attempts to obscure his knowledge of Melville’s works, fuelled by fears of being thought a plagiarist. Lowry’s novel In Ballast to the White Sea (1934–36)— thought lost during his lifetime, but now recovered and published—draws particularly on Redburn (1849), despite Lowry’s claims not to have read the book. Lowry’s use of Redburn to examine father-son relations, to chart the fate of the individual in an increasingly globalised world, and to construct the Liverpool setting shared by the two texts suggests that he was, indeed, familiar with the novel. More importantly, Lowry understood Melville as a theorist of modernity’s impact on time and place, anticipating twenty-first century readings of Redburn. Approaching Redburn through In Ballast reveals the interplay between real and imagined space in Melville’s depiction of Liverpool, and his efforts to understand and represent heterotopia. Recovering In Ballast and its debt to Melville, therefore, also recovers Lowry as an original and astute reader of Melville, and repositions Redburn as an experimental fiction.

This essay examines how building 'boutique' digital relational databases can help scholars investigate the transatlantic reprinting of American literature in the nineteenth century. Relational databases allow researchers to organize data about books in ways that resist the categories of author and first edition that have traditionally structured literary and bibliographic inquiry. They instead encourage greater attention to the groupings in which texts were circulated, consumed, and understood in their moments of production and reproduction. After outlining the reprinting of American literature in nineteenth-century Britain, we suggest how the databases' relational structure enables researchers to navigate the networks of books, authors, and publishers into which a reprint could situate a work. Two projects that have employed databases differently to investigate transatlantic reprinting—Katie McGettigan and Paul Raphael Rooney's \"Nineteenth-Century Publishers' Series in the British Library\" and Marie Léger-St-Jean's Price One Penny—demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of databases in print culture research. Overall, we argue that transforming print artifacts into digital database records is a form of remediation that echoes characteristics of a transatlantic culture of reprinting, facilitates new perspectives on nineteenth-century print culture, and relies upon real-world networks between scholars, archivists, and collectors.

The following roundtable was commissioned as a set of brief oral presentations delivered at the joint annual conferences of the British and Irish Associations for American Studies (affectionately referred to here as \"IBAAS\"), hosted by Queen's University Belfast, on 9 April 2016. We, the associate editors of the Journal of American Studies, envisaged the roundtable as an opportunity for early-career scholars to get together and discuss the importance of the \"second project.\" In such a competitive job market, simply seeing your PhD through to publication is often not enough to land that elusive academic position; having a clearly articulated \"second project\" is important for securing a postdoctoral fellowship and/or full-time, permanent lecturing appointment. With this mind, we invited five early-career scholars (four of whom are represented here) to reflect on both the intellectual and the logistical challenges of conceptualizing a second project, especially given the precarious circumstances in which many early-career scholars teach and research once the PhD is complete and/or funding has run out. The event elicited much discussion by audience members and, in this print version of the roundtable, we include three responses by established scholars who attended the session and whom we invited to comment on the roundtable. We are deeply grateful to our ECR participants and respondents for reflecting so passionately and eloquently on changing iterations of the second project, its challenges and rewards, and on the responsibilities of established academics vis-a-vis those who have recently entered the profession.

In this chapter, the author presents discussions on genre, race, and the printed book and material books. Melville focuses on the binding to poke fun at the pointlessness of reviewing a well‐known novel of 1827, but also argues that books matter–that books are material objects that have an expressive potential of their own. Across his fiction and poetry, Melville attends to the materiality of print: to the book as an object, and to its manufacture and circulation. Through the entangled aesthetics and politics of his engagements with the printed book, Melville experiments with genre and examines the production of racial difference. Melville suggests that the (re)production of printed impressions made authentic accounts impossible. Melville also embeds the materiality of print in the complex racial dynamics of Typee , a text that both employs and subverts travel writing's white gaze, questioning white supremacy while, reinforcing the binary understanding of race that underpinned slavery.