Cultural Text Studies is a series of themed monographs, edited by researchers at the Dept. of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Aalborg University and associates and friends of the Dept. The purpose of the series is to be a forum for the publication of results of research in the broadly defined area of cultural text. Transatlantic, the present volume, offers interdisciplinary scholarship, bringing together explorations of transatlantic perspectives in arts, literature, history, philosophy and law. In the individual essays the transatlantic perspective opens up comparative aspects of phenomena within these fields, but this perspective also allows for a new type of engagement with the phenomena themselves, which are analysed in new historical, transnational contexts. The volume is itself an expression of a transatlantic exchange. The contributors are all affiliated with either Aalborg University or Brenau University, two small research and educational institutions which have long experimented with transatlantic exchanges of students, faculty and scholarship.