This book provides a much-needed comparative approach to the history of cities by investigating the dissemination of cultural forms between cities of the Atlantic world. The contributors attend to the various forms and norms of cultural representation in Atlantic history, examining a wealth of diverse topics such as the Portuguese Atlantic; the Spanish Empire; Guy Fawkes and the conspiratorial rhetoric of slaves; Albert-Charles Wulffleff and the Parc-Musée of Dakar; and the writings of Jane Austen, Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin, and others. By interpreting Atlantic urban history through sustained attention to customs and representational forms, an international group of nine contributors demonstrate the power of culture in the making of Atlantic urban experience, even as they acknowledge the harsh realities of economic history.

Autorentext

Leonard von Morzé is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. He is the coeditor of Urban Identity and the Atlantic World. He has published extensively on colonial American literature and serves as an Associate Editor of The New England Quarterly.

Inhalt

.- Introduction.- Invisible Cities: Space and the Politics of Comparison in the Portuguese Atlantic World.- Courtly Ceremonies and an Urban Geography of Power in the Spanish Empire.- Explorers, Pirates and Urban Intellectuals: Towards a Cultural History of the Atlantic Frontier.- Figures of the Circulating Self.-'Blazing Effects': The Fifth of November, Guy Fawkes, and the Rhetoric of Slave Conspiracy.- Circling the Squares: City-Building in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.- Atlantic Thinking in Jane Austen's Novels.- Imagined Cities and Atlantic Modernism.- Open Doors, Closed Spaces: The Transatlantic Imaginary in American City Writing from Post-Revolutionary Literature to Modernism.- English-Canadian Actresses and the Multiple Networks of the Urban Atlantic, 1890s1920s.- A Museum is Born: Albert-Charles Wulffleff and the Parc-Musée of Dakar, 1936