Nation and Migration provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants, exploring the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture

Introduction: Decentering Transatlantic Literary Studies ; Chapter One: From English Empire to British Atlantic World ; Chapter Two: The Irish Uncanny and the American Gothic ; Chapter Three: Scots and Scott in the Early Republic ; Chapter Four: Wales and the American West ; Chapter Five: The Literary Sketch and British Atlantic Regionalism ; Conclusion: British Atlantic Worlds: Anglo-American, Colonial, and Archipelagic ; Bibliography

Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to our recognition of how regionalism continued to be a force both in Britain and in North America during the early national period. ... Shield's charting of the unfolding of archipelagic British literatures "in dialectical relation to their American counterparts" (127) adds an important dimension to our understanding of the transatlantic cultural matrix at the turn of the nineteenth century.

"Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to our recognition of how regionalism continued to be a force both in Britain and in North America during the early national period. ... Shields's charting of the unfolding of archipelagic British literatures "in dialectical relation to their American counterparts" (127) adds an important dimension to our understanding of the transatlantic cultural matrix at the turn of the nineteenth century." --Paul Giles, Modern Language Quarterly "Shields's approach-eschewing "the nation-state as a primary or natural unit of analysis while nonetheless acknowledging its long-standing role in organizing literary study" (139)-and her focus on microgeographies result in a lucid study of Romantic-era literature that tests and displaces conventional geographical and genre boundaries. Nation and Migration is a welcome contribution to a field of study that keeps revealing important literary and critical spaces." --Michael Wiley, Modern Philology "The new field of Atlantic studies (or study of the British Atlantic world) has so far relied mainly on a binary of Great Britain and America. Shields (Univ. of Washington) looks in a more fine-grained way at stories about (if not by) Irish, Scots, and Welsh immigrants to America....Shields's illuminating readings show that all the myths contributed- though often in quite different, even contradictory ways- both to an emerging American identity and to the creation of self-conscious regional identities in Britain itself. An excellent final chapter relates ethnic identity to the emergence of the new genre of the literary "sketch."" --D. L. Patey, CHOICE "The map of transatlantic influence shifts and strains as Shields takes an international and regional approach to nation formation. 'Britain' is appropriately interrogated as Welsh, Scottish and Irish, with each region turning out to be uniquely defined and defining in its expanded context. This is an appropriately adventurous book that ranges widely among authors and makes connections on which others will surely build."-- Caroline McCracken-Flesher, author of The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders "Juliet Shields convincingly remaps the British Atlantic, demonstrating how the cultural and literary exchanges between Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and America profoundly shaped the contours of their respective national identities. Vigorously argued, Nation and Migration is a compelling guide out of the binary opposition of England and America in turn of the nineteenth century literary study and will be necessary reading for those working on the British Atlantic world." -- Justine S. Murison, author of The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature "Nation and Migration offers readings of a wide and illuminating range of texts, some familiar, some new, and in doing so provides a very welcome corrective to over-simplified notions of the Britain (and British Literature) against which the United States formed its emergent identity, literary and otherwise. Its thorough-going commitment to decentering Anglo-American literary studies pays rich dividends in terms of our understanding the various and varied literatures that made up the British and Anglo-American Atlantic worlds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." -- Dafydd Moore, author of Enlightenment and Romance in James Macpherson's the Poems of Ossian: Myth, Genre and Cultural Change

Selling point: Distinguishes the migration stories of the Scots, Irish and Welsh from those of the English for their unique contributions to American cultural identity Selling point: Shows how the narratives appropriated from Welsh, Scots and Irish migrants by American writers merged with representations of Native Americans Selling point: Illustrates the dialectial relationship between nation and migration through the stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement

Selling point: Distinguishes the migration stories of the Scots, Irish and Welsh from those of the English for their unique contributions to American cultural identity Selling point: Shows how the narratives appropriated from Welsh, Scots and Irish migrants by American writers merged with representations of Native Americans Selling point: Illustrates the dialectial relationship between nation and migration through the stories that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britons and Americans told about transatlantic migration and settlement