Böcker i Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultu-serien

Traces authors' attitudes toward US economic expansionism through their fictional allusions to internationally-traded commodities Offering an interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, Consuming Empire assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain and wheat, Consuming Empire reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, Consuming Empire considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures and artists as self-aware acknowledgements of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own. Heather Wayne is a teacher of English and independent scholar living in Massachusetts. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century US literature, material culture, feminism, visual culture, empire and global history.

[headline]Advances our understanding of the literary legacy of contemporary ecological crises to investigate the interfaces of humanity and nature At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature of empire building. This includes analyses of texts composed by (or about) persons residing at, or just outside, the edges of the British and American Empires, including St Kitts and Nevis, Haiti, Cuba, Hawaii and Samoa, which were built around the global transfer of animals and plants. Offering biotic readings of this literature, McAuley highlights the human place in nature and provides practical literary examples of the ways oceans facilitate the confusion of time and place. [bio]Louis Kirk McAuley has been Associate Professor in the Department of English at Washington State University, USA, since 2014. He has published numerous articles and book chapters and is the author of Print Technology in Scotland and America, 1740-1800 (2013).