Richard Gravil. Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities 1776-1862. Palgrave, 2000. ISBN 0312227167. Price: US$75.

With the 1986 publication of Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson, Robert Weisbuch expressed his intentions of inaugurating a field of literary study left unexplored because of the “conventional habits by which departments of English and comparative literature organize themselves.” Transatlantic Romanticism was thus declared new and open terrain by a pioneer who actually “beg[ged] for the correction and completion of this study by others.” In Romantic Dialogues: Anglo American Continuities 1776-1862, Richard Gravil supports, expands, and challenges Weisbuch’s groundbreaking work. Gravil upholds the premise that writers of the American Renaissance shaped the beginnings of their country’s literary tradition by responding to English Romanticism. He also posits that America shared in the genesis of Romantic ideology by inspiring the British Romantics and by demonstrating something approaching an indigenous American Romanticism. Beginning his discussion with an analysis of what he calls the Anglo-American Revolution, Gravil adds a sociopolitical foreground to discussion of Transatlantic Romanticism; developing suggestions of influence into substantial links (as in the chapter on Melville and Coleridge), he supplies revealing perspectives on established writers, and encourages further development of the field. Starting with Blake’s America and concluding with Dickinson’s readings of British Romanticism, Romantic Dialogues covers an ambitious amount of ground in record time. Consequently, there are no surprises among the names listed in the chapter headings. Gravil makes his argument accessible to scholars of British and American Romanticism alike by focusing on major writers on either side of the Atlantic. He often acknowledges his omissions, and yet remains intent upon constructing an organized, foundational reading of Anglo-American literary history. Part I, entitled “Revolution and Independence, 1776-1837,” sets the scene for a discussion of America’s growing interest in cultural as well as political independence from Britain. As Gravil points out, the myth of an autochthonous American literature still obscures the complex series of events that demonstrate the empire’s strong hold on America, as well as the ex-colony’s lingering dependence. In Part II, “Redeeming the Promise of England, 1823-1862,” Gravil investigates individual cases of England’s influence on the development of American letters. Establishing Burke’s influence on Cooper, or supporting studies linking Keats to Hawthorne, Gravil builds his case for how British Romanticism shaped and inspired the American Renaissance. An English scholar who has recently published a book entitled Master Narratives: Tale and Telling in the English Novel (2001), Gravil is situated on “the other side of the pond,” both literally and intellectually. In his introduction to Romantic Dialogues, he admits that his “ear is primarily attuned” to Wordsworth, and Wordsworth’s reception and resonance in America are indeed focal points of the book. Happily for Gravil and his readers, one could not choose a more important or representative figure for a study of Transatlantic Romanticism. Not only was Wordsworth considered the purest emanation of the spirit of the age in Britain and America; he was the only living example of that spirit to a young man living in a cabin on Walden Pond, to an ambitious penny daily journalist in Brooklyn, and to every editor of The Dial in the magazine’s four year history. And yet America’s new voices were not always willing to proclaim their admiration and debts to an aging poet laureate who wrote sonnets supporting capital punishment and charged visitors for tea. Gravil’s fluency in the Wordsworthian mode enables him to recognize the most subtle intimations of imitation— signs of influence that may have been unintentional or unconscious even to the writers themselves. Walden, for example, is shown to reflect Thoreau’s readings of many minor works by …