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Innocence the magic charm is, Keeping sorrow’s form at bay; By its influence, every harm is Banished ruthlessly away; Ill and danger fright her not, Happy is her simple lot. –E.M. 1 ‘By the Lake: An Indian Eclogue’ by ‘E.M.’ appeared in the British Guianese newspaper the Colonist in 1882 and was not, to my knowledge, ever republished. It did not really need to be. Its central trope – the Indigenous subject as innocent, childlike, and idle – is so often repeated in settler descriptions of native peoples, so
The Peterloo Massacre was more than just a Manchester event. The attendees, on whom Manchester industry depended, came from a large spread of the wider textile regions. The large demonstrations that followed in the autumn of 1819, protesting against the actions of the authorities, were pan-regional and national. The reaction to Peterloo established the massacre as firmly part of the radical canon of martyrdom in the story of popular protest for democracy. This article argues for the significance of Peterloo in fostering a sense of regional and northern identities in England. Demonstrators expressed an alternative patriotism to the anti-radical loyalism as defined by the authorities and other opponents of mass collective action.
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
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.
to twentieth-century immigration from Europe and the British Empire, Scotland has historically and presently an overtly diverse cultural identity. Regardless of what language or languages are spoken at present, most Scots are aware of the linguistic diversity of their own backgrounds. A workingclass woman from a post-industrial Ayrshire steel town whose first language is Scots may share with a middle-class man born in Edinburgh whose first language is English the fact that each has a great-grandparent who was a native Gaelic speaker. This shows the degree of threat
7 Sounding out the margins: ethnicity and popular music in British cultural studies SEAN CAMPBELL Introduction In their discussion of the development of British cultural studies,1 Jon Stratton and Ien Ang point out that the ‘energizing impulse’ of the field has ‘historically … lain in [a] critical concern with, and validation of, the subordinate, the marginalized [and] the subaltern within Britain’ (1996: 376). Accordingly, many of the field’s principal practitioners have paid a considerable amount of attention to questions of ‘race’2 and ethnicity in post
Cook Islands Māori, and had only withdrawn these objections when Buzacott decided to take Kiro with him. 5 In later years, Buzacott told the British and Foreign Bible Society: I did not like to undertake [the translation of the Bible] without the assistance of a native. One was selected – a young man from the College, of good sound judgment; and during the two years he was with me in England he was of great assistance to me in translating, and correcting the portions already translated. 6 The 1851 edition of Te Bibilia Tapu , published by the British
5 The Union and Jack: British masculinities, pomophobia, and the post-nation BERTHOLD SCHOENE Starting with a general theoretical investigation into nationalist imageries of masculine and feminine embodiment, this essay offers a tentative outline of some of the most problematic shifts in the conceptualisation and literary representation of man, self and nation in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The second part of the essay comprises a close reading of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1993 [1956]), which is to illustrate the syndromic inextricability
It is not too much to say, that the intercourse of Europeans in general, without any exception in favour of the subjects of Great Britain, has been, unless when attended by missionary exertions, a source of many calamities to uncivilized nations. (Aborigines Protection Society [House of Commons], 1837, 3–4) The demise of the word ‘liberal’, and the increasing opprobrium that is heaped upon it, is a consequence, in part, of its unchecked relationship to the history of colonialism. This failure of a political idea to take root in imperial outposts is
producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’ (1993: 400). Given this re-evaluation of identity, Hall argues that diasporic culture is instrumental in postcolonial formations wherever there is recognition of displacement, hybridity, colonial history, and creolised language. Consequently, Gilroy can conclude that Black Britain defines itself crucially as part of a diaspora. Its unique cultures draw inspiration from those developed by black populations elsewhere. In particular, the culture and politics of black America and the Caribbean