Special relationships : Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how __Our Nig__, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead. Front matter Contents Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott’s shoulders? Stowe’s sunny memories of Highland slavery Gothic legacies: Jane Eyre in Elizabeth Stoddard’s New England Our Nig: fetters of an American farmgirl Crossing over: spiritualism and the Atlantic divide Poet of comrades:Walt Whitman and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship Nation making and fiction making: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover, and Walter Scott, Waverley Beyond the Americana: Henry James reads George Eliot ‘If I Were a Man’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand and the sexual education of girls ‘Embattled tendencies’:Wharton,Woolf and the nature of Modernism Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood Encounters with genius: Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead Index This collection of essays by leading scholars of American literature and culture has emerged out of recent debates on the historical, geographical, symbolic, and cultural significance of the Atlantic, as well as new work in the area of Transatlantic Studies. In a series of fascinating essays the authors have produced diverse and innovative interventions in the field of Anglo-American literary relations. The authors discussed range from Gertrude Stein to Alfred North Whitehead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Sarah Grand, Henry James to George Eliot, Elizabeth Stoddard to Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain to Walter Scott through to Djuna Barnes and Evelyn Waugh. Subjects discussed include Scottish-American literary relations, the Atlanticist dimension of Spiritualism, American interventions in the debate about Highland clearances, American slavery and British pastoralism. Opening up readings of writers in the growing field of transatlanticism, this text discusses diverse and innovative interventions in the field of Anglo-American literary relations, revealing previously unresearched connections between writers on both sides of the Atlantic