Introduction Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning; 1. Transatlantic books and literary culture Richard Sher; 2. Transatlantic Utopianism and the writing of America Wil Verhoeven; 3. Tales of wonder, spiritual autobiographies and providence tales Jim Egan; 4. Life writings Susan Imbarrato; 5. Benjamin Franklin and transatlantic literary journalism Carla Mulford; 6. Theatre, drama, performance Jeffrey Richards; 7. Transatlantic American Indians Tim Fulford; 8. Literature of the ocean Janet Sorensen; 9. 'To gird this watery globe': Freneau, Barlow and American neoclassical poetry Paul Giles; 10. Ghostly and vernacular presences in the Black Atlantic Alan Rice; 11. Susanna Rowson and the transatlantic captivity narrative Lise Sorensen; 12. Domestic fiction and the reprint trade Eve Tavor Bannet; 13. Transatlantic Gothic Robert Miles; 14. Transatlantic Romanticisms Colleen Glenney Boggs; 15. Journeys of the imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge Joel Pace; 16. Transatlantic historical fiction Susan Manning; Further reading; Index.

"The recently developed field of transatlantic literary studies has encouraged scholars to move beyond national literatures towards an examination of communications between Britain and the Americas. The true extent and importance of these material and literary exchanges is only just beginning to be discovered. This collection of original essays explores the transatlantic literary imagination during the key period from 1660 to 1830: from the colonization of the Americas to the formative decades following political separation between the nations. Contributions from leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic bring a variety of approaches and methods to bear on both familiar and undiscovered texts. Revealing how literary genres were borrowed and readapted to a different context, the volume offers an index of the larger literary influences going backwards and forwards across the ocean"