Carlyle, Emerson and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority

Emerson and Carlyle were an odd couple and a transatlantic cultural powerhouse. Their decades-long exchange electrified literary circuits and jolted thinking about historiography, race, nationhood, copyright and lecturing, as Tim Sommer shows. This shrewd study of the nineteenth century’s alternating currents of cultural authority snaps and crackles with insights. -- Michèle Mendelssohn, Oxford University
Tim Sommer’s Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority is a remarkable book. In it, paratextual analysis takes center stage, and what might have been seen in previous decades as influence, inheritance, tradition, or just friendship is recast in terms of print cultures, marketplace tactics, and the writing and rewriting of transnational codes: what America meant to Britain and Britain to America. Sommer does not overlook textual content and literary criticism, but he manages to understand the explicit textual performances of authority in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson in broader contexts where both authors attempt to use the transatlantic to establish and solidify their right to assume certain kinds of intellectual and cultural power. [...] the scholarship that Sommer’s book represents is essential to the development of an enhanced understanding of the elaborate networks of cultural production in operation to generate authority, if simply to be on guard against future claims of authority—cultural, political, or otherwise. -- Rob Breton, Nipissing University * Victorian Studies *