Emersonian Circles and the Southern Hemisphere

Reveals the influence of Transcendentalism in the Southern Hemisphere, focusing on Latin America, South Africa, Australia and the South Pacific

• Combines literary history, close reading, history and political critique to present a new transhemispheric understanding of 19th Century literature and culture that focuses on the exchanges between the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres
• Rereads canonical US figures, including Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau in relation to the Southern Hemisphere
• Presents a reading of Emerson’s English Traits as a critique of the British Empire with special attention paid to his views of the South African and Australasian colonies

Emersonian Circles demonstrates the often-overlooked importance of the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century as a region of enormous creative activity and as a voracious audience for foreign literature. It focuses on the US Transcendentalists, and their relationship – directly and indirectly - with writers in Latin America, Southern Africa and Australia. It reconsiders canonical American figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, arguing that the Southern Hemisphere was essential to their understanding of the world and presents a broader transnational appreciation of writers often confined to Western, Northern or Transatlantic frameworks. Equally, it provides the first study of how several nineteenth-century communities south of the equator adapted Transcendentalism to suit local needs, contending that a double-sided account of these interactions can enrich our interpretations of both US and world literary texts, enabling new approaches to be taken on questions of race, settler colonialism, Romantic nationalism and globalisation.