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The Atlantic turn in historical and literary studies has created a wave of interest among scholars in both fields whose research agendas do not fit easily within nationalist and territorial paradigms.1 The sheer expan- siveness of the field of Atlantic history has generated an exciting array of studies on the impact of the Atlantic on the development of economic, po- litical, and cultural systems on the four continents that form its basin.2 And yet, for all the attention that has been paid to the myriad exchanges that took place throughout the Atlantic world, there is still a pressing need for more extensive study of maritime society itself. In their assessment of the present state and future prospects of the field, Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan argue that Atlantic historians need to pay more attention to the multiple and varied maritime cultures of the Atlantic, and that Atlantic history must explore more fully the "exchange of values and the circulation of ideas" that accompanied the movements of people and goods across the ocean (12, 14).
Literary historians have recently come to a similar conclusion. Tradi- tional approaches to early American literary history have framed the disci- pline in protonationalist terms, making little room for oceanic subjects whose modes of belonging and patterns of movement do not fit neatly within nationalist paradigms. Hester Blum has shown that the critical bias toward the nation has obscured the value of a vast archive of texts written by maritime workers. Her recent call for an oceanic focus within literary studies urges scholars to attend simultaneously to the "material conditions and praxis of the maritime world" and the "epistemological structures pro- vided by the lives and writings of those for whom the sea was simulta- neously workplace, home, passage, penitentiary, and promise" ("Prospect" 670-71). Blum's approach offers literary historians a way of thinking about labor and literary production as co-constitutive processes in a way that resonates with Atlantic historians' search for methodologies capable of rendering an intellectual history of the Atlantic.
It appears on the face of it that historians and literary historians of the Atlantic world have come to one of those moments when the kind of inter- disciplinary exchange that defines scholarship in the humanities at its...