Sharing the Experience of Cosmopolitanism through Literature

Abstract

The growth of the American literary market provided the Boston Cosmopolitans with a promising conduit to express their ideas. Following the Civil War, increasing numbers of magazines and inexpensive books multiplied alongside the growth of public libraries. As Henry James remarked in the British magazine Literature in 1898, “whatever [literature] may be destined to be, the public to which it addresses itself is of proportions that no other single public has approached.… It is assuredly true that literature for the billion will not be literature as we have hitherto known it at its best. But if the billion give the pitch of production and circulation, they do something else besides; they hang before us a wide picture of opportunities.”1 The Cosmopolitans attempted to convey some part of the experience of traveling abroad in literary pieces that were targeted toward a wide and growing reading public. In this chapter, I chose works that attempted to represent and in some cases to reproduce the sense of wonder and discovery the Boston Cosmopolitans felt during their journeys. The wide range of literary genres encountered—fiction, drama, travel literature, and popular philosophy— provides today’s readers with a broad phenomenological description of the development of cosmopolitanism.