Baym, American Women Writers, pp. 1–10. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972, p. 492. Hereafter, W. Letter to W.D. Howells, quoted in Donahue, ‘Introduction’, The Tory Lover, p. viii. For information on Jewett’s family, see Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, pp. 7–9. Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Patterns in Scottish and English Culture, Edinburgh, Polygon, 1996, p. 71 (his emphasis). Ina Ferris, ‘Story-telling and the Subversion of Literary Form in Walter Scott’s Fiction’, in Shaw (ed.), Critical Essays, pp. 98 and 101. This may partly
radically, it marked the recognition that civilisation, the symbolic ordering of human life, is power. Today, with the insights of Gramsci and Foucault part of the common currency of at least some domains of the academic intellectual culture, such notions trip easily from the tongue. A generation ago this was not so. In the British case – yet more if we were to think of the dominating position of English
postmodern? (1996: 24–5) But pomophobia does not always of necessity manifest itself in crass, catastrophically violent, fascistic reassertions of the ancient self/other binary. Its presence may be latent in a culture as, I find, it is in Britain, particularly in English culture but perhaps also, so I would like to argue, in Scottish culture. Since the collapse of the Empire, the British nation has been suffering from a severe cultural identity crisis, considerably exacerbated by the fact that it now sees its socio-economic status, cultural prestige and national identity
generation whose insights would transform the lives not only of their daughters and granddaughters, but of their sons and grandsons too. Notes 1 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Penguin, 2010 [1928]): 46. 2 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]). On soldiers’ writings, see also: Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992); Samuel Hynes, The Soldier
insight into the modernization of imperialism and nationalism themselves. And upper-class Anglo-Celtic femininity was an important part of such modernization. In Forever England Alison Light shows, through literary sources, how English culture and patriotism became bound up with domesticity and ‘the private’ at this time. 30 The tour was another representation of such modernity
Appendix III of Instinct and the Unconscious (p. 192).) See Richard Slobodin’s biography, W. H. R. Rivers (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1997), pp. 54–7. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London, Virago, 1993), p. 174. Hereafter cited in the text as Showalter. See Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993), pp. 68–9, 75. The Good Soldier, pp. 25, 42. I think the sense of judgement or conscience is implied here (conspicuous by its absence in a way), although what Ford is actually referring to is the
thought and feeling’ which provided the roots of what it was to be West Indian. 2 James wrote his history of the revolution in San Domingue, The Black Jacobins , in 1938, after leaving Trinidad to live in the metropole, the place where journalists and writers from the colonies could hope to make a name for themselves. James was steeped in Victorian English culture, and perhaps was expressing in this
’, he subsequently wrote, ‘that London is a cold white city where English culture is great and formidable like an iceberg. It is a city created for English needs, and admirable, no doubt, for the English people. It was not built to accommodate Negroes. I was very happy when I could get out of it to go back to the Negro pale of America’, where life was more robust and less hypocritical. 60
writes, ‘Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’. 76 The Caribbean is a place of scents and colours; England a place of grey streets and dark houses. English culture is figured as machine-like, unfeeling, driven by money, repressed. The Caribbean is sensuous, passionate, vibrant, spontaneous. England, Teresa O’Connor has argued, is for Rhys male-dominated; the Caribbean is largely
involved with, Europe: an ‘enemy within’. The crisis of identity that now faced a generation of British-born West Indians, also living within but apart from English culture, was CAM’s concern. This proved true, and the special double issue of Savacou , ‘Writing away from home’ (published in 1974 but three years in the editing) is now recognised as the first anthology of black British literature. 12