Overview

Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815-1835 argues that a select group of late-Romantic English and American writers disrupted national tropes by reclaiming their countries' shared historical identification with hospitality. In doing so, they reimagined the spaces of encounter: the city, the coast of England, and the Atlantic itself.

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9781137340047

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Reviews

We do not know what hospitality is,' Jacques Derrida once said. Yet, in Cynthia Schoolar Williams' competent hands, this non-knowledge proves to be exceptionally generative. Succinct and intellectually agile, her book traces the frisson of threshold experiences activating and connecting the work of a range of Romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Through a series of intelligent readings, Williams demonstrates that thresholds are wholly fraught spaces, at once scenes of alienation, intimacy, and possibility. Her book explores what it means hospitably to encounter a stranger and to be encountered as a stranger-including a stranger to oneself. She gives us a robust language with which to consider the fierce vicissitudes of nineteenth-century forms of welcoming and belonging in whose wake we continue to struggle. - David L. Clark, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Canada

Author Information

Cynthia Schoolar Williams is Instructor in the Deptartment of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, USA.

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