Reviewed by: Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority by Tim Sommer Rob Breton (bio) Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority, by Tim Sommer; pp. x + 270. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, $110.00, $29.95 paper, £85.00, £24.99 paper. Tim Sommer's Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority is a remarkable book. In it, paratextual analysis takes center stage, and what might have been seen in previous decades as influence, inheritance, tradition, or just friendship is recast in terms of print cultures, marketplace tactics, and the writing and rewriting of transnational codes: what America meant to Britain and Britain to America. Sommer does not overlook [End Page 651] textual content and literary criticism, but he manages to understand the explicit textual performances of authority in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson in broader contexts where both authors attempt to use the transatlantic to establish and solidify their right to assume certain kinds of intellectual and cultural power. Doing so, Sommer puts the nineteenth-century transatlantic at the center of his work, treating Carlyle and Emerson as case studies, and very much expanding the kind of research first opened up by F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) and then developed by Robert Weisbuch in Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (1986). Looking not only at Transatlantic Uses of Authority, but also at the way Carlyle and Emerson construct the transatlantic to be used, Sommer brings into his study a huge range of contexts, including cross-Atlantic discourses of racial and national identity, international print and marketing cultures and the infinitely complex laws surrounding copyright, and lecture circuits in both Britain and America. Though the focus is consistently pulled toward material forms of cultural networking, that focus will prove immensely helpful to scholars working on either specific titles by Carlyle or Emerson, or really any nineteenth-century author who might be seen as using nation or national difference to create an image and an audience. Carlyle and Emerson are nonetheless central to Sommer in that he demonstrates that the business behind their books, the gears of promotion, are inseparable from both the authorial dominance and the social orders the books attempt to establish. Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority begins with clear articulations of the project and argument, spelling out critical conversations around Carlyle, Emerson, and the deeply interconnected Anglo-American cultural circles of the early nineteenth century. What differentiates his contribution, he argues, is the integration or synthesizing of material histories, "a range of historical and institutional contexts that have so far mostly been studied in isolation" (4). But he also adds greatly to critical conversations by theorizing authority in new ways, exploring what authority might mean to different audiences and the way that cultural or intellectual authority would have to be constantly repackaged according to circumstance, leading to intermittent emphases on and then denials of a transatlantic cultural connection. We see that reciprocal commercial exchanges between Carlyle and Emerson, the way they supported each other's endeavors overseas, had a thematic, ideological, and symbolic side useful to themselves and their projects. Working in part from Pierre Bourdieu's theories of how social groups create practices of inclusion and exclusion, Sommer then sets out to explore the "framework that linked literary authorship to questions of racial, cultural or national identity" (40). Using archival work to explore the language of ethnic identity in relation to the language of authority in a transatlantic context, Sommer traces a shift in rhetoric from the national to the racial, a shift toward Saxonness that could be successful on both sides of the Atlantic. The following section then returns to discussions of nationhood and the way the transatlantic provided means to create cultural continuities and mutual traditions that legitimated and entrenched literary authority to mutual advantage. Sommer also draws attention to publication strategies and the way Carlyle and Emerson adapted to transatlantic contexts: to varying critical receptions of their work [End Page 652] and to international copyright rules. Sommer's arguments are always thoroughly and specifically...