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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.
:70 Davenant’s desire to dramatise sadistic Spaniards was not arbitrary. Cromwell actively pursued an anti-Spanish foreign policy. Dramatic representations of cruelty committed by Spanish conquerors could therefore only aid in resurrecting the anti-Spanish sentiment that, in the 1620s, had so strongly opposed the possibility of a betrothal between the then Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. In a manuscript written in the same hand as the letter to Thurloe, Davenant makes a more frank and pragmatic plea for dramatic representation.71 Davenant proposes that
The martial adventures of the New Arcadia have produced a good deal of critical opinion about what such knightly escapades might suggest about Sidney’s political philosophy. Sidney’s position, as a well-connected courtier who opposed Elizabeth’s marriage to Anjou and who favoured a more active foreign policy in defence of the Protestant religion, provides a ready point of departure for such discussions. In this chapter, I engage with the strand of critical thought that finds there to be a mismatch between the chivalric ethos of the New Arcadia and Sidney
figures who died in these years reflect deep unhappiness with British foreign policy in general and the failures in military and political leadership. 6 While military deaths were infrequent through most of James’ reign, a single late Elizabethan one had a decades-long influence. When Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586 during a military campaign in Holland, an unprecedented abundance
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
David Blunkett, from a September 2002 essay for the Foreign Policy Centre, in reference to Asian families in Britain in the wake of riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham in the north of England in the summer of 2001, as well as 9/11. In the essay, Blunkett articulated a vision of citizenship, civil society, and the preservation of democracy underpinned by a seemingly fragile linguistic order demanding to be maintained at the level of the home, the family, the individual speaker. English was the means for British GILMOUR 9781526108845 PRINT.indd 236 11/06/2020 11
London on 9 April 1739, comments on the conduct of foreign policy during the late years of Sir Robert Walpole’s premiership (1721–42). 1 The consequences of the War of Polish Succession (1733–5), during which Britain had remained neutral, had been ratified by the Treaty of Vienna in January 1739. The terms had largely been beneficial to the French; they had strengthened their dynastic networks and, as a
sought to woo Elizabeth into accepting his transnational vision. Indeed, Essex and Elizabeth often had conflicting political approaches to foreign policy (to put it mildly), and their disagreements were driven by fundamentally different philosophies. Elizabeth and key statesmen such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil viewed international affairs through a domestic lens that was rooted in