ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses international illustrations to The Last Days of Pompeii throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, to demonstrate that illustrations from around the Atlantic emphasise the novel's Christian aspects. It interrogates the network of relationships between individual subjects within the travelogue-cum-fiction-cum-natural history narrative, Crèvecour's Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York. The book traces a network of very distinct voices from this North American landscape, each of which contributes their intimate knowledge of nature to the larger project of natural knowledge production. It outlines the circulation of Blake's poetry among the Transcendentalist community, tracking his critical reception and the influence on Emerson's work in particular. The book shows how the particular conditions of the literary market, the transatlantic network of translators and translated texts, provided the context for Brown's works to emerge as international bestsellers.
