Introduction Introducing Transatlantic Romanticism

The narrative of the profession of literary study that emerges while reading the mosaic of short paragraphs that comprise the "MLA JIL" offers a portrait of the current state of academic affairs. The Job Information List of the Modern Language Association divides literatures in English into British and American, and thereby widens a gulf between national literatures that for centuries have been defined by transatlantic contact, contestation, and conversation. The list, of course, did not create “the artificial divide between literatures in English […], a divide recognized by few creative writers but enshrined in the academic community,” to quote from the text that appears on the back cover of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. Symbiosis seeks to bridge this rift that, as Sohui Lee’s article in this special issue of Romanticism on the Net points out, has been perpetuated, ironically, by centuries of transatlantic critical dialogue, involving American assertions of political and poetical independence from England and British pronouncements on the inability of a republic to produce a national literature. Since the late twentieth century, a host of scholars has worked to connect Atlantic-rim literatures, and the MLA JIL has begun to reflect this change, especially in recent years: indeed, virtually every major research university in America has advertised an opening for a scholar who has expertise in transatlantic literary and cultural relations. The words “transatlantic” and “transnational” are occurring with increasing frequency as operative adjectives describing “attractive” and “highly valued” research and teaching interests of candidates. The mosaic of job advertisements gives us a picture of a new field that is emerging. The fascinating, new directions of research and teaching indicated by the MLA list are not arbitrary; the list does not merely go “where it listeth,” but defines and is defined by international scholarship and pedagogy. An interesting course for research and instruction was already being set once American institutions of higher education (following the lead of Harvard University) began calling the “English Department” the “Department of English and American Language and Literature.” But the problem of categorization extends beyond nomenclature for departments and appointments to the organization of university courses and libraries. Like U.S. call numbers, U.K. shelfmarks assign separate spaces to seemingly separate literatures. Karen Karbiener’s book review (included in this special issue) comments on British and American literature, noting that “[t]hese fields are as separate on the shelves of American libraries as they are in the catalogues of American literature departments; studies of Transatlantic literary relations must still be sorted either in the Library of Congress 'PR' or 'PS' sections, with the Anglo preceding the American.” Alphabetically, there is no space between these call numbers to designate a middle ground (or shelf) for comparatist books, unless a P.S. were added to the PS (and the PR) section. Transatlantic studies, however, is developing into much more than a post scriptum to single-nation studies: it is, in Karbiener’s words, “an effort to draw both American and British scholars to a center of sorts, and to break the silence between the last “PR” and the first “PS.” This sub-field does not seek to conflate American and British literature, to make these seemingly separate spheres concentric, but to examine and theorize the considerable space of overlap between them. For earlier scholars, the literature of these two nations was distinct, as far as undergraduate and graduate-level coursework was concerned. As Lance Newman has pointed out, there is, however, a new cohort of scholars emerging for whom the transnationalism of Atlantic-rim literature and literary culture is no longer a hypothesis but an axiom. As a result, what was …