This dissertation is about literary ambition in the Anglophone Atlantic. It marks the effects of such ambition on the fiction of Irish, Scottish, and American authors of the early nineteenth century, all of whom sought success in London, the great metropolis of the English-speaking world. Such authors accommodated English readers by developing literary strategies to guide their audience through the unfamiliar territory of their fiction. Their stories are shaped by the implied presence of a foreign reader that haunts the text; I call them “tales from elsewhere.” This dissertation investigates their most significant formal features, the cultural and economic pressures that produced them, the material contexts of their production, and the ideological work they perform.

The importance of English readers in a London-centered literary field led Irish, Scottish, and American authors to put cross-cultural communion to work as an aesthetic value. They constructed the transnational literary exchange as independent from a contentious and divisive political world. Such idealization produces the fantasy of an autonomous literary sphere, a kind of elite Anglo-American republic of letters grounded in a shared moral and aesthetic sensibility.

My account of “tales from elsewhere” begins with the Irish novels of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, which banish national and imperial politics to encode an idealized relationship between an Irish author and English reader. I then turn to Washington Irving and argue that his promotion of Anglo-American literary sharing in The Sketch Book originates in his deep engagement with the transatlantic circulation of texts. After this, I reassess the relationship between Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper by exploring their cultural and economic dependence on England, a condition reflected in the plot of The Heart of Mid-Lothian and the textual history of The Pioneers. The project concludes with an account of changes in English-language publishing at mid-century that contribute to the decline of England as the cultural capital of the Anglophone Atlantic. I argue that Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reflects a newly organized literary field that no longer has a clearly authoritative audience to which writers could turn for recognition.