Cosmopolitanism and Provincialism: Distant Intimacy and the Transatlantic Village Tale

From Three Mile Cross, Mitford’s village home, across the Atlantic to Boston and beyond, Mitford’s village tales could be said to go global. This paper examines the way in which the village tale provides a set of terms and an imagined space through with circles of writers and literary people in different countries collectively conceived a transatlantic literary world. It considers the implications of this and of the instability of the distinctions between the terms provincial and cosmopolitan, and the legacies of this in the mid-nineteenth-century shaping of national literary traditions.