is left desiring more distinctions between Coleridge and Emerson, it is only because Harvey has established their deep similarities and their importance to Transatlantic Transcendentalism so fully. Jonathan Koefoed University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA jkoefoed@austin.utexas.edu © 2015, Jonathan Koefoed http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2015.1088324 Atlantic citizens: nineteenth-century American writers at work in the world, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, Edinburgh, University Press, 2013, 240 pp., £70, $120 (hardback), ISBN-10:074866937X, ISBN-13:978-0748669370, including notes, bibliography, and index Although Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Grace Greenwood, and Walt Whitman as a group make strange bed- fellows, Eckel asserts that their identity as citizens of the world rather than proponents of American exceptionalism reveals them to be likely companions after all. Some of these writers attained ‘partial cosmopolitanism’, what Kwame Anthony Appiah, notes Eckel, describes as a combination ‘that preserves its partiality to kindred, home, and nation even as it looks beyond those limits for opportunities to know and to serve others’ (8). Looking beyond those limits is the primary focus of the study undertaken by Eckel, who summons an impressive variety of written and oral sources that have not received widespread attention: ‘Transcripts of speeches, newspa- per articles, editorial columns, personal journals and letters, teaching notes, juvenile magazines, and critical reviews’ (14). By juxtaposing these extraliterary sources along- side the lengthier works on which the reputation of these writers rests (Longfellow’s Evangeline, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Douglass’s autobiographies, Emerson’s Nature and the Essays, Greenwood’s eponymous Greenwood Leaves, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), Eckel illuminates their transatlantic affinities, albeit in varying degrees, which have largely gone without notice. As a result, Eckel’s contri- bution to the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures offers a fresh perspective on the ties that bind these disparate nineteenth-century American writers together and suggests important continuities between them and two contemporary writers: the Car- ibbean-American novelist Paule Marshall in her memoir, Triangular Road, and the journalist Adam Gopnik in his two essay collections, Paris to the Moon and Americans in Paris. Eckel begins with Longfellow whose comment in ‘The Schoolmaster’ undergirds her entire project: ‘I said with the Cosmopolite,’ ‘The world is a kind of book, in which he, who has seen his own country only, has read but one page’ (19). Longfellow clearly had read multiple pages by virtue of his extensive travel abroad, his command of Greek and Latin as well as several modern European languages, his translation of texts into English (e.g. Dante’s Divine Comedy), and his many textbooks, all of which merit the designation of Longfellow ‘as a founder of American comparative literary Book Reviews 387 mailto:jkoefoed@gmail.com studies’, according to Eckel (21). She also finds that the transatlantic focus in Evange- line counters the idea of manifest destiny promoted by many writers of the period. Although none of the remaining five writers in her study embraced transatlanticism as fully as Longfellow, two of them – Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass – excoriated the USA for failing to live up to its ideals by comparing it unfavourably with other countries. Eckel highlights Fuller’s notion of ‘cosmopolitian patriots’ to suggest that the ideals of world citizen and national patriot might be successfully com- bined or at least alternate. The latter seems evident in Douglass, who used political transatlanticism to ‘skewer’ America but did not allow it to keep him from later reclaiming himself as a citizen of the USA despite his doubts about whether he actu- ally had a country, as Eckel acknowledges. The global reach of Emerson’s transatlanti- cism, however, extended far beyond Longfellow’s comparativist claims or the political bent of Fuller and Douglass’s interests, making Emerson – at least in Eckel’s hands – not so much a cosmopolitan citizen of the world as a citizen of the cosmos. As for Greenwood and Whitman, entrepreneurship appears to have motivated what Eckel calls their ‘transatlantic professionalism’: Greenwood made many trips abroad to promote her juvenile magazine, The Little Pilgrim, and other writings whereas Whitman, whose travels outside the U.S. were limited to Canada, welcomed the opportunity to widen his readership for which he was greatly indebted to the London publication of Michael Rossetti’s selected Poems of Walt Whitman in 1868. In casting Whitman as a poet without honour in his own country, Rossetti depicted England as culturally superior to the USA in much the same way, argues Eckel, that Fuller and Douglass enlisted social and political developments abroad to chal- lenge the ideals espoused back home. While Eckel’s treatment of the transatlantic affi- nities of these six writers may be a bit of a stretch in some instances, her study nevertheless deepens our understanding of the period and of our own by exploring how these writers became part of an emergent internationalism. Constance J. Post Department of English, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-1201, USA cjpost@iastate.edu © 2015, Constance J. Post http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2015.1101257 388 Book Reviews