Special Relationships: Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms 1854-1936

279 Pages·2003·1.45 MB·English

by  Janet Beer

BEER1 15/08/2002 2:54 pm Page 1
THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS by leading scholars AS
n
of American literature and culture has emerged gp
out of recent debates on the historical, lo-e
Ac
geographical, symbolic and cultural connections m
i
between Britain and America, as well as new work era
icl
in the area of Transatlantic Studies. a
nr

ae
The contributors have produced diverse and n
tl
innovative interventions in the field of British aga
ot
American literary relations, bringing together ni
GertrudeStein and AlfredNorthWhitehead, ismo Special
n
CharlottePerkinsGilman and SarahGrand, s
as
HenryJames and GeorgeEliot, ElizabethStoddard ndh
and CharlotteBrontë, MarkTwain and ai relationships
ffip
WalterScott, EdithWharton and VirginiaWoolf as n
well as DjunaBarnes and EvelynWaugh. Subjects ities
s
discussed include Scottish American literary
18 Anglo-American
relations, the Atlanticist dimension of spiritualism, 5
4
American interventions in the debate about –
1 antagonisms
9
Highland clearances, American slavery and British 3
6
pastoralism.
and affinities
B
E
E
R
1854–1936
Janet Beer is Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean of Humanities and an
d
Social Science at Manchester Metropolitan University.
B
E
Bridget Bennett is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at N
the University of Leeds. N
E edited by
T
T JANET BEER and BRIDGET BENNETT

e
d
s
Special relationships

Special relationships
ffi
Anglo-American a nities
and antagonisms 1854–1936
edited by
Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2002
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,
copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors,and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of
both author and publisher.
Published byManchester University Press
Oxford Road,Manchester M13 9NR,UK
andRoom 400,175 Fifth Avenue,New York,NY 10010,USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed exclusively in the USA by
Palgrave,175 Fifth Avenue,New York,
NY 10010,USA
Distributed exclusively in Canada by
UBC Press,University ofBritish Columbia,2029 West Mall,
Vancouver,BC,Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7190 5817 1 hardback
ISBN 0 7190 5818 X paperback
First published 2002
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset 10/12pt Minion
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd,Manchester
Printed in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain Ltd,Glasgow
Contents
Notes on contributors pagevii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett
1 Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott’s shoulders? 8
Susan Manning
2 Stowe’s sunny memories ofHighland slavery 28
Judie Newman
3 Gothic legacies:Jane Eyrein Elizabeth Stoddard’s New England 42
Anne-Marie Ford
4 Our Nig:fetters ofan American farmgirl 65
R.J.Ellis
5 Crossing over:spiritualism and the Atlantic divide 89
Bridget Bennett
6 Poet ofcomrades:Walt Whitman and the Bolton Whitman
Fellowship 110
Carolyn Masel
7 Nation making and fiction making:Sarah Orne Jewett,
The Tory Lover,and Walter Scott,Waverley 139
Alison Easton
8 Beyond the Americana:Henry James reads George Eliot 160
Lindsey Traub
vi Contents
9 ‘IfI Were a Man’:Charlotte Perkins Gilman,Sarah Grand and
the sexual education ofgirls 178
Janet Beer and Ann Heilmann
10 ‘Embattled tendencies’:Wharton,Woolfand the nature of
Modernism 202
Katherine Joslin
11 Unreal cities and undead legacies:T.S.Eliot and Gothic
hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful ofDust and Barnes’s
Nightwood 224
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik
12 Encounters with genius:Gertrude Stein and Alfred North
Whitehead 242
Kate Fullbrook
Index 259
Notes on contributors
Janet Beer is Dean of Humanities and Social Science at Manchester
Metropolitan University.Her research interests are late nineteenth-/early
twentieth-century American women writers and contemporary
Canadianfiction.She is the author ofEdith Wharton: Traveller in the Land
of Letters (1990), Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction(1997) and Edith Wharton(2002) as well
as a wide range ofreviews and essays.
Bridget Bennettis Senior Lecturer in the School ofEnglish,University of
Leeds.Her books include an edited book Ripples of Dissent(1996),The
Damnation of Harold Frederic (1997) and a jointly edited book (with
Jeremy Treglown) Grub Street to the Ivory Tower(1998).She is currently
working on a book on nineteenth-century American spiritualism.
Alison Eastonis Senior Lecturer in English and a former Director ofthe
Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University.She is author ofThe
Making of the Hawthorne Subject, and essays on nineteenth-century
American women writers and class relations.She has edited the Penguin
Sarah Orne Jewett,The Country ofthe Pointed Firs and Other Stories,and
the Macmillan New Casebook,Angela Carter,and is co-editor ofWomen,
Power and Resistance: An Introduction to Women’s Studies.She also pub-
lished work on gender and nation (in relation to Scotland), and on
African-American and Caribbean women writers.She is now engaged on
a book on Jewett and social class.
Richard J. Ellis is Professor of English and American Studies at the
Nottingham Trent University.He currently edits Comparative American
Studies(Sage). His most recent book is a study of the novels of Jack
viii Notes on contributors
Kerouac,Liar! Liar!: Jack Kerouac – Novelist(1999).In 1998 he edited the
first modern edition ofHarriet Wilson’s Our Nig.He has published widely
on African-American and contemporary American fiction and on little
magazines as a cultural field.
Anne-Marie Fordhas just completed a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan
University on the work of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard.In 1998 she was
winner of the Marcus Cunliffe travel bursary, awarded by the British
Association for American Studies. She is a contributing editor to Key
Texts: Documents in the History ofAmerican Feminism 1848–1920,to be
published by Routledge.
Kate Fullbrookis Professor ofLiterary Studies and Associate Dean in the
Faculty ofHumanities at the University ofthe West ofEngland.She is the
author ofKatherine Mansfield(1986),Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics
in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction (1990), and, with Edward
Fullbrook,Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a
Twentieth-Century Legend (1993) and Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical
Introduction (1998). In addition, she has published many articles and
reviews.Her major interests are in twentieth-century fiction,American
literature,and literature and ethics.
Ann Heilmann is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales
Swansea,where she teaches nineteenth-century literature and women’s
writing.She is the author of New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-
Wave Feminism (2000) and the general editor of Routledge’s History of
Feminism series. She has edited two anthology sets, The Late-Victorian
Marriage Question (1998) and (with Stephanie Forward) Sex, Social
Purity and Sarah Grand (2000) and a special issue on the New Woman
(for Nineteenth-Century Feminisms).A collection of essays on Feminist
Forerunners: Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century
(Pandora) is forthcoming,and she is now working on a special suffrage
issue (for Women’s History Review) and a book on New Woman Strategies
for Manchester University Press.
AvrilHornerisProfessorofEnglishat Kingston University andformerly
Directorof theEuropeanStudiesResearchInstituteattheUniversityof
Salford. Her research interests and publications focus on twentieth-
centuryliteratureand,inparticular,onmodernpoetry,women’swriting
andtheGothic.SheistheeditorofEuropeanGothic:ASpiritedExchange,
Notes on contributors ix
1760–1960(2002).Sheistheco-author,withSueZlosnik,ofLandscapes
of Desire: Metaphors in ModernWomen’s Fiction (1990) and Daphne du
Maurier:Writing,IdentityandtheGothicImagination(1998).Theyhave
alsopublishedanumberofarticlesandbookchaptersonGothicwriting.
She is currently working, with Sue Zlosnik, on Gothic and the Comic
Turn,tobepublishedbyPalgrave.
Katherine Joslinis the author ofEdith Whartonin Macmillan’s Women
Writers Series and co editor ofWretched Exotic: Essays on Edith Wharton
in Europe. Her scholarly work includes essays on Willa Cather, Kate
Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, George Sand and Emile Zola. Joslin is a
Professor of English at Western Michigan University, where she has
received the Alumni Teaching Excellence Award and is the director ofan
interdisciplinary programme in American Studies. Over the past three
years,she has directed a Fulbright Summer Institute in the Study ofthe
United States for International Educators.Joslin is currently completing
a literary biography ofJane Addams that considers her social work in the
context ofher several books on urban culture and global peace.
Susan Manning is Grierson Professor of English Literature at the
University ofEdinburgh.Her primary research interests lie in the field of
Scottish–American literary relations,the subject ofher book The Puritan-
Provincial Vision (1990). A second transatlantic study, Fragments of
Union,was published by Palgrave in 2001.She has edited the works of
Henry Mackenzie (including a new edition ofJulia de Roubignépublished
by Tuckwell Press in 1999),Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward,Washington
Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Hector St John de
Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Marble FaunOUP,2002).She has also published arti-
cles on a variety of Scottish and American Enlightenment texts and
topics.
Carolyn Maselstudied at the University ofMelbourne,the University of
Toronto and the University of Essex, before becoming a lecturer in
American Studies at the University of Manchester. Her special field is
modern poetry,particularly the poetry of Wallace Stevens,but she also
writes on Canadian and Australian literatures. Her work focuses on
poetics,intertextuality,influence,gender and issues in postcolonialism.
She has been instrumental in preparing the archives of the Bolton
Whitman Fellowship at the John Rylands Library ofManchester and the