Atlantic Republic The American Tradition in English Literature

by Giles, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780199567034
• ISBN10: 0199567034
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 analyzes 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.

Author Biography

Paul Giles is Professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
Introduction: Reformation, Disestablishment, Transnationalism	p. 1
The American Revolution and the Rhetoric of Schism	p. 12
Samuel Johnson and the Loss of America	p. 12
Enlightenment Liberty	p. 21
Transatlantic Romanticism and Parliamentary Reform	p. 31
William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and the Anglican Order	p. 31
P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, and the Republican Inheritance	p. 45
Reform as Apocalypse: Mary Shelley and the Novel of Purpose	p. 55
The First Cold War: Anglo-American Literature and the Oregon Question	p. 71
Manifest Destiny and Anglophobia	p. 71
The Land Politics of Transcendentalism	p. 81
English Counterfire	p. 93
Arthur Hugh Clough and the Poetics of Dissent	p. 112
Negative Transcendentalism: The Dialogue with R. W. Emerson	p. 112
Anti-Anglicanism: The Dialogue with Matthew Arnold	p. 122
Aestheticism, Americanization, and Empire	p. 135
The Aesthetic Movement's Transatlantic Horizons	p. 135
The Local and the Global	p. 151
Great Traditions: Modernism, Canonization, Counter-Reformation	p. 171
Spirit Summoned West	p. 171
The Constitution of Silence	p. 186
The Fascist Imaginary: Abstraction, Violence, and the Second World War	p. 201
Arcadia Noir	p. 201
Through the Looking Glass	p. 223
Postwar Poetry and the Purifications of Exile	p. 245
The Just City	p. 245
The Double Image	p. 261
A Gathered Church	p. 270
Postmodernist Fiction and the Inversion of History	p. 286
Perverse Reformations	p. 286
American Ghosts	p. 304
Parallel Universes	p. 315
Global English and the Politics of Traversal	p. 330
The Art of Blasphemy	p. 330
A New World Order	p. 346
Conclusion: The Transnationalization of English Literature	p. 358
Works Cited	p. 365
Index	p. 409
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