Year: 2006
Author: Paul Giles
Genre: Literary criticism
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0-19-920633-3; 978-019-920633-9
English language
Format: DjVu
Interactive table of contents: Yes
Number of Pages: 429
Atlantic Republic traces the legacy of the United States both as a place and as an idea in the work of English writers from 1776 to the present day. Seeing the disputes of the Reformation as a precursor to this transatlantic divide, it argues that America has operated since the Revolution as a focal point for various traditions of dissent within English culture. By ranging over writers from Richard Price and Susanna Rowson in the 1790s to Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book argues that America haunts the English literary tradition as a parallel space where ideology and aesthetics are configured differently. Consequently, it suggests, many of the key episodes in British history-parliamentary reform in the 1830s, the imperial designs of the Victorian era, the twentieth-century conflict with fascism, the advance of globalization since 1980-have been shaped by implicit dialogues with American cultural models. Rather than simply reinforcing the benign myth of a 'special relationship', Paul Giles considers how various English writers over the past 200 years have engaged with America for various complicated reasons: its promise of political republicanism (Byron, Mary Shelley); its emphasis on religious disestablishment (Clough, Gissing); its prospect of pastoral regeneration (Ruxton, Lawrence); its vision of scientific futurism (Huxley, Ballard). The book also analyses the complex cultural relations between Britain and the United States around the time of the Second World War, suggesting that writers such as Wodehouse, Isherwood, and Auden understood the United States and Germany to offer alternative versions of the kind of technological modernity that appeared equally hostile to traditional forms of English culture. The book ends with a consideration of ways in which the canon of English literature might appear in a different light if seen from a transnational rather than a familiar national perspective.
Preface
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Reformation, Disestablishment, Transnationalism
1. The American Revolution and the Rhetoric of Schism
Samuel Johnson and the Loss of America
Enlightenment Liberry: Richard Price and Susanna Rowson
2. Transatlantic Romanticism and Parliamentary Reform
William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and the Anglican Order
P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, and the Republican Inheritance
Reform as Apocalypse: Mary Shelley and the Novel of Purpose
3. The First Cold War: Anglo-American Literature and the Oregon Question
Manifest Destiny and Anglophobia
The Land Politics of Transcendentalism
English Counterfire: Charles Dickens and George Ruxton
4. Arthur Hugh Clough and the Poetics of Dissent
Negative Transcendentalism: The Dialogue with R. W. Emerson
Anti-Anglicanism: The Dialogue with Matthew Arnold
5. Aestheticism, Americanization, and Empire
The Aesthetic Movement's Transatlantic Horizons
The Local and the Global: George Gissing
6. Great Traditions: Modernism, Canonization, Counter-Reformation
Spirit Summoned West: D. H. Lawrence
The Constitution of Silence: T. S. Eliot
7. The Fascist Imaginary: Abstraction, Violence, and the Second World War
Arcadia Noir: P. G. Wodehouse
Through the Looking Glass: Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood
8. Postwar Poetry and the Purifications of Exile
The Just City: W. H. Auden
The Double Image: Dcnisc Leverrov
A Gathered Church: Donald Davie
9. Postmodernist Fiction and the Inversion of History
Perverse Reformations: J. G. Ballard
American Ghosts: Angela Carter
Parallel Universes: Martin Amis
10. Global English and the Politics of Traversal
The Art of Blasphemy: Salman Rushdie
A New World Order: Caryl Phillips
Conclusion: The Transnationalization of English Literature
Works Cited
Index
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