Papers by Christopher Hanlon
The Review of English Studies, 2021
At one point in his 1841 'Self-Reliance', Emerson reminds us of '[t]hat popular fable of the sot ... more At one point in his 1841 'Self-Reliance', Emerson reminds us of '[t]hat popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke [.. .]'. For Emerson, the trope 'owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince'. Upon reading Sarah Meer's meticulously researched, trenchantly argued American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, 1820-1920, one must conclude that the 'popularity' to which Emerson refers is less transcendent than particular; that such plotlines speak to the exigencies of the transatlantic literary culture in which Emerson wrote. Meer offers a long-nineteenth-century history of the 'claimant narrative'-usually, the story of the dispossessed American heir laying claim to a British title or estate. Forming its deep archive out of literary, print, artistic, and material cultures that treat the theme explicitly or from the vantage of some parallel interest, American Claimants demonstrates the reach of the theme and its centrality to key nineteenth-century controversies. In a prefatory first chapter, Meer identifies the claimant narrative as rendition of transatlantic romance that mediates difference rooted in national, political, cultural, or linguistic disparity. Recognizing its origins in a much older 'romance of the lost heir' that underlies Shakespeare, Homer, and Bible, she situates the nineteenthcentury rendition in the most usual terms it deploys: loud, sometimes obstreperous, interloping American claimants; Britons who are appalled, transformed, or both through sudden propinquity with long-lost transatlantic kin; and a host of resulting tensions surrounding Republicanism, monarchy, British hierarchy, and American slavery. The second chapter pursues such motifs through early American theatre, its figuration of the Yankee, and a dramatization of transatlantic encounter that situates Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens (both of whom registered scepticism over American commitment to liberty and equality). Meer ends this meditation with a satisfying reading of Our American Cousin (1858)-famously, the play Lincoln attended when he was assassinated, but one that channels transatlantic struggles over democracy and aristocracy-in which John Wilkes Boothe had once performed a role aligned with his own hatred of Lincoln's humble origins.
American Literature, Sep 2010
American Literary History, Jan 1, 2010
American Literary History, Jan 1, 2007
College Literature, Jan 1, 2005
Pedagogy, 2005
Here are two qualities I want to fi nd in every student essay written for one of my literature co... more Here are two qualities I want to fi nd in every student essay written for one of my literature courses:
Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism, Jan 1, 2000
New Literary History, Jan 1, 2001
Books by Christopher Hanlon
Public Writing by Christopher Hanlon
L.A. Review of Books/Avidly, 2019
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Papers by Christopher Hanlon
Books by Christopher Hanlon
Public Writing by Christopher Hanlon