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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.
are concerned with parallelisms: two writers working on similar ideas, divided by a nation and an ocean. A key question that runs through the collection is what a focus on transatlantic relations can bring to our understanding of literary production and ideas of authorship and of national characteristics. Many of the contributors to the volume have opted to investigate these issues by examining specific relationships between two writers, one American, one British. The result of this is to produce a model of literary influence that operates at a close and personal
understood. Telegraphy – which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century helping to narrow and circumvent the space between America, Britain, and therefore its European neighbours – was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The medium John Murray Spear explained the significance of electricity and telegraphy within his spiritual cosmos in the following way: Between the Grand Central Mind and all inferior minds there subsists a connection, a telegraphic communication, by means