Transatlantic realms: The idea of America in British literary imagination

Far from signaling the disappearance of America in British literary representation, the American Revolution forced writers in the post-war generation to re-contextualize the role of America within British consciousness. Foregrounding the tension between literary and historical memory, this dissertation argues for a broader understanding of America in British literature as an imaginative space that shaped conceptions of British identity and imperialism and occupied a central role in Romantic cultural formations. America became a contested symbol of profound political and aesthetic force, which British authors brought to bear on a multitude of concerns, from government reform and emigration to war and colonialism. In 1790s print ephemera and poetry, the ideological roots of British disaffection inherited by both radicals and reactionaries during the American War fueled and structured a visionary rhetoric of revolution. Writers such as William Blake and John Thelwall marshaled in their writings an idealized image of America as a symbol of radical protest that employed a politically charged rhetoric of corporeality to highlight monarchical and ministerial despotism. However, through the fog of war, other writers began to depict America as a site of natural excess, brutality, and corruption. With their “unromantic” vision of America, texts by Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and William Wordsworth resist the prevailing idea of America as politically redemptive by focusing on the bodies of British soldiers. Such poetic images of trauma registered the lingering domestic impact of British imperial and military history after the American Revolution. With the revival of New World conquest on the late-Georgian stage, eighteenth-century conceptions of America crossed temporal as well as geographic boundaries, and the attention given to Spanish America in spectacular plays by Richard Sheridan and Thomas Morton fueled public fascination with sixteenth-century colonial history. Relying strategically upon the example of America, these plays served to dramatize past, present, and future European imperial ideologies and provided a vehicle for reactionary representations of America in opposition to the more radical constructions articulated in Romantic-era poetry and political ephemera