Enfilade

From the U of Massachusets Press:

Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach, eds., Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1625341143, $30.

That the Romantic movement was an international phenomenon is a commonplace, yet to date, historical study of the movement has tended to focus primarily on its national manifestations. This volume offers a new perspective. In thirteen chapters devoted to artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leading scholars of the period examine the international exchanges that were crucial for the rise of Romanticism in England and the United States.

In the book’s introduction, Andrew Hemingway—building on the theoretical work of Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre—proposes that we need to remobilize the concept of Weltanschauung, or comprehensive worldview, in order to develop the kind of synthetic history of arts and ideas the phenomenon of Romanticism demands. The essays that follow focus on the London and New York art worlds and such key figures as Benjamin West, Thomas Bewick, John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, John Martin, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville. Taken together, these essays plot the rise of a romantic anti-capitalist Weltanschauung as well as the dialectic between Romanticism’s national and international manifestations.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Matthew Beaumont, David Bindman, Leo Costello, Nicholas Grindle, Wayne Franklin, Janet Koenig, William Pressly, Robert Sayre, William Truettner, Dell Upton, and William Vaughan.

Andrew Hemingway is professor emeritus of art history, University College London, and author of The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America.
Alan Wallach is professor emeritus of art and art history, The College of William and Mary, and author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Capitalism, Nationalism, and the Romantic Weltanschauung, Andrew Hemingway

I  The City
1  ‘The pit of modern art’: Practice and Ambition in the London Art World, William Vaughan
2  The Urban Ecology of Art in Antebellum New York, Dell Upton
3  Urban Convalescence in Lamb, Poe, and Baudelaire, Matthew Beaumont

II  History
4  Sublime and Fall: Benjamin West and the Politics of the Sublime in Early Nineteenth-Century Marylebone, Nicholas Grindle
5  Benjamin West’s Royal Chapel at Windsor: Who’s in Charge, the Patron or the Painter?, William Pressly
6  The Politics of Style; Allston’s and Martin’s Belshazzars Compared, Andrew Hemingway
7  James Fenimore Coooper and American Artists in Europe: Art, Religion, and Politics, Wayne Franklin

III  Landscape
8  John Martin, Thomas Cole, and Deep Time, David Bindman
9  ‘Gorgeous, but altogether false”: Turner, Cole, and Transatlantic Ideas of Decline, Leo Costello
10  Thomas Cole and Transatlantic Romanticism, Allan Wallach

IV  Race
11  Picturing the Murder of Jane McCrea: A Critical Moment in Transatlantic Romanticism, William H. Truettner
12  The Romantic Indian Commodified: Text and Image in George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1841), Robert Woods Sayre
13  Romantic Racialism and the Antislavery Novels of Stowe, Hildreth, and Melville, Janet Koenig

Notes on Contributors
Index