ENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-209-224
Abstract
In recent years, modernist studies have tended to nationalize issues, putting forward specific features of American and British modernist writings. This article treats Anglo-American modernism in terms of ‘the inverted conquest’ (A. Mejias-Lopez) with America ‘wrestling cultural authority from its former European metropolis’. The article starts with the subject of periphery and centre changing places, first in the imagination of American writers and then in reality. In F. M. Ford’s novel The Good Soldier the situation is seen as if the American would absorb the English. An American John Dowell outmatches and ultimately disparages ‘the good soldier’ and a superior Briton Ashburnham. The novel is analyzed as a result of pushing together two ways of writing - English and American (Jamesonian). Louis MacNeice treats the ‘Americanization of poetry’ in Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938). In Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934) Edith Sitwell affirms the triumph of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry over ‘the bareness of the line’ in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, famous for its poetical Englishness. A sort of latent urge to reaffirm Englishness against advancing Americanism is obvious in Virginia Woolf’s essays on American writers.
About the Author
O. PolovinkinaRussian Federation
Olga Ivanovna Polovinkina, Doctor of Philology, professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Head of the Department of Comparative Literature
Academic interests include American studies and ‘metaphysical poetry’. Author of the books ‘The Shiny Skies’. Metaphysical Style in American Poetry of the Early 20th Century [‘Probleski nebes’. Metafizicheskiy stil v amerikanskoy poezii pervoy poloviny XX veka] (2005), Metaphysical Style in the History of American Poetry [Metafizicheskiy stil v istorii amerikanskoy poezii] (2011), as well as numerous articles about the works of J. Donne, T. S. Elliot, etc.
References
1. Abravanel G. Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012.
2. Chielens E. E. Periodicals and the Development of an American Literature // Making America, Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper / Ed. by A. Robert Lee, W. M. Verhoeven. Amsterdam: Rodopi Bv Editions, 1996. P. 93-105.
3. Cuddy-Keane M. Paradigmatic and Palimpsestic Plots in The Good Soldier // Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: Centenary Essays / Ed. by Max Saunders, Sara Haslam. Boston: Brill, 2015. P. 47-62.
4. Eliot T. S. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Faber and Faber, 1949.
5. Emerson R. W. The Complete Works. Hollister, MO: YOGeBooks, 2014.
6. Ford F. M. Return to Yesterday. Manchester: Ford Press, 1999.
7. Ford F. M. The English Novel. From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad. 2012. URL: http://gutenberg.net.au/ ebooks12/1203251h.html.
8. Giles P. Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U. P., 2001.
9. Haslam S. Dowell and Dopamine: Information, Pleasure and Plot // Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: Centenary Essays. P. 213-222.
10. MacKay M. Great Britain // The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism / Ed. by Pericles Lewis. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2011. P. 117-132.
11. MacNeice L. Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. London: Oxford U. P., 1938.
12. Mejias-Lopez A. The Inverted Conquest. The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt U. P., 2009.
13. Rickets H. ‘Early Kipling told by Henry James’: A Reading of The Good Soldier // Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: Centenary Essays. P. 213-222.
14. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism / Ed. by Walter Kalajian. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005.
15. Snyder A. K. Defining Noah Webster: A Spiritual Biography. Washington, D. C.: Xulon Press, 2002.
16. Tennenhouse L. The Importance of Feeling English. American Literature and the British Diaspora. 1750-1850. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2007.
17. Thoreau H. D. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
18. Weisbuch R. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
19. Woolf V. American Fiction // The Saturday Review of Literature (New York). August 1, 1925. Р. 1-2.
20. Woolf V. America, Which I Have Never Seen // The Dublin Review. 2001. No. 5. URL: http://thedublinreview.com/number-5/
Review
For citations:
Polovinkina O. ENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’. Voprosy literatury. 2018;(1):209-224. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-209-224