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

Abstract

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. Table of contents: 1 Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott’s shoulders? / Susan Manning 2 Stowe’s sunny memories of Highland slavery / Judie Newman 3 Gothic legacies: Jane Eyre in Elizabeth Stoddard’s New England / Anne-Marie Ford 4 Our Nig: fetters of an American farmgirl / R.J. Ellis 5 Crossing over: spiritualism and the Atlantic divide / Bridget Bennett 6 Poet of comrades: Walt Whitman and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship / Carolyn Masel 7 Nation making and fiction making: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover, and Walter Scott, Waverley / Alison Easton 8 Beyond the Americana: Henry James reads George Eliot / Lindsey Traub 9 ‘If I Were a Man’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand and the sexual education of girls / Janet Beer and Ann Heilmann 10 ‘Embattled tendencies’: Wharton,Woolf and the nature of Modernism / Katherine Joslin 11 Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood / Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 12 Encounters with genius: Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead / Kate Fullbrook