Susan Manning and Andy Taylor’s conspectus is a timely and invaluable resource for students and scholars researching in the broad field of Transatlantic Studies and, more specifically, in “the sub-field that concerns itself explicitly with transatlantic texts and comparisons.”  As the introduction makes clear, it proceeds from an assumption – political, but with profound cultural implications – that “the autonomously secure national space – whether defined through tangible or imagined characteristics – is no longer a viable category of self-definition.”  In a world characterised by increasingly permeable borders, identity can no longer be based on natal ideas of soil or land, but rather on “migration and exchange” and “the reciprocal flow of cultures.”

There are of course dangers in such assumptions, and one of the particular strengths of this book is its awareness of those dangers, reflected in a choice of texts which aims to highlight and interrogate the ideological underpinning of much thinking in the field.  The extract from Robert A. Gross’ article “The Transnational Turn,” for example, reminds the interested reader that “the push for ‘post-nationalism’” might be “the self-serving stance of a cosmopolitan elite, centred in America and Europe, and profiting, economically and culturally, from the ready flow of people, capital, and information across national borders.”  Ultimately, for all its evident benefits, an ideal of diversity and trans-nationalism may end up as “a strategy for advancing US power in the post-Cold War world.” 

The inclusion of such texts means that this is far more than a simple compendium: it is a book which aims actively to participate in contemporary debates.  Without pretending to comprehensiveness (which would be impossible and somewhat overweening), it provides the reader with valuable routes into key arenas of discussion, as well as opportunities to extend research through the bibliographies of further reading at the end of each section’s introduction.  Structurally, it should be said, Transatlantic Literary Studies is largely successful.  Though there is inevitably some arbitrariness in deciding which texts to place together, the various broad themes – “Imperialism and the Postcolonial,” “Translation” and so on – have a pleasing coherence which allows for ease of reference.

All of which makes for a harmonious marriage of form and content.  Here is a collection explicitly concerned with diversity, with the breaking down of monolithic conceptions of identity, whose structure facilitates productive cross-referencing and allows texts to interpenetrate in meaningful ways, to, as it were, cross borders.