Thomas Moore has long been considered Ireland’s national bard and the face of colonial grievance in Ireland. But he also grew up in a port city and then travelled with and worked for the British Navy. Dubbing himself 'transatlantic Tom', Moore rode and wrote about the currents of the north Atlantic and coastal locations key to naval operations and trade routes. Following Moore on these lines of motion allows us to trace local and global circuits, including literary networks, agricultural trade, interests in the Atlantic fishery, migration, military activity and the coercions of the slave trade. Powered by water, such motion pulls against the fictions of stable, bounded property necessary to the British Empire and influential in British Romanticism. Moore not only transits Irish Romanticism and British Romanticism: he is also a window onto a sea-level view of the Romantic era.

An essential read. Julia M. Wright offers a stimulating study of ‘transatlantic Tom’ that opens into an expansive and original investigation of early nineteenth-century Irish and British literature and culture as shaped by sea and ocean. With co-ordinates located in Dublin and Halifax, Wright's book maps fascinating local stories onto a global frame, taking in Bermuda and Haiti as well as continental Europe, Canada and the eastern United States. -- Claire Connolly, University College Cork

Julia M. Wright, FRSC, is Professor and George Munro Chair in Literature and Rhetoric in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. She is the author of Men with Stakes: Masculinity and the Gothic in US Television (2016), Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism (2014), Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (2004). She is also the editor or co-editor of a further eleven volumes, including Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology (2008) and editions of three novels for Broadview Press.