Race and Nationhood in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Field

Abstract

Engaging work in sociology and nationalism research, this chapter opens with an account of the function of ascriptions of racial and national identity in Carlyle’s and Emerson’s early transatlantic reception. Their critics – New England Unitarians and New York Young Americans as much as Tory intellectuals and Victorian novelists – tended to exclude them from membership in the Anglo-American literary sphere while their supporters resorted to the rhetoric of race to make a case for their reintegration. The remainder of the chapter provides a more general discussion of mid-century racialism on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading Carlyle’s and Emerson’s writings on race in the context of a contemporary Anglo-American discourse of Anglo-Saxon history and culture, the chapter demonstrates that assertions and denials of biological and cultural kinship played a key role in a complex nineteenth-century debate about transatlantic authority.