ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter provides the main theoretical bearings of the book. It draws on the work of established transnational and transatlantic scholars to establish the difficult balancing act nineteenth-century Anglo-American transatlantic studies has to perform, finding a middle ground between isolationism and linguistic idealism. It offers an alternative perspective which considers nineteenth-century cultural exchange within the context of the emergent global financial market, and which argues that new economic structures like joint-stock companies and limited liability incorporation created an uneasy sense of a vast shared economic space where labor, money, and products could circulate almost without check. As a result, concepts of nationhood and community in contemporary literature took on an explicitly economic facet.
