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.
12 Encounters with genius: Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead Kate Fullbrook Notoriously, in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), 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. This remarkable statement, which functions as one of the main structural elements of the text, first appears at the end of the first chapter, in the context of Alice’s initial encounter with the woman who was to become her friend and lover. In typical Steinian
theory took over English departments with a vengeance. Translators from the French were working overtime. Modernism, ill-defined, and postmodernism, even more so – the latter term continues its vexed reign, this despite the consolations derived from those ambitious studies cited above – was a tempting though still ambiguous borderline for the JML authors, centring their attention as they did on an uncontested canonical space of ‘primary’ texts: Eliot, Pound, Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence and Gertrude Stein loom large. ‘The remarks that follow’, Beebe wrote
attitudes of mutual suspicion in letters to many of their friends but never to each other. In contrast, the remarkable intellectual affinity between Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead, at a crucial moment in the development of their literary and philosophical careers, provides a model of a productive Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, a description that can also be applied to the extraordinary sympathy which developed Introduction 3 between the members of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship and those who were in close association with the poet in the United States
of travel itself as a socially emancipatory project: good for the worldly soul, good for the soul of the world. Perhaps one of cosmopolitics’ best known proponents is Ghanaian-born Harvard philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose essay ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ quotes Gertrude Stein most approvingly: ‘I am an American and Paris is my hometown’.2 This reinforces Appiah’s celebration of global mobility as a freedom to ‘elect the local forms of human life within which [you] will live’ (p. 95). This freedom of self-creation, for Appiah, lies at the heart of
certain of the statements, and particularly some strictures had been a little mollified’.17 During her training at Johns Hopkins La Motte may have become acquainted with Gertrude Stein (who was, at that time, a medical student at the hospital). Stein, one of the most remarkable intellects of her time, did not complete her medical training, but went on, instead, to study psychology with William James, and then to pursue a career as a writer. She developed an extraordinary style that was later to be viewed as an important strand in the development of twentieth
appears to have held evening parties here. Although wartime stringency meant that these in no way resembled the lavish soirées she had held in pre-war London, it was noted by writer Gertrude Stein that Borden’s house was one of the few where there was enough fuel to keep warm during the terrible winter of 1915.43 It is not clear how well Borden and Stein knew each other, but references in Stein’s Autobiography of Alice Toklas suggest that they were fairly close acquaintances, and that Borden visited Stein’s salon at the rue de Fleurus on several occasions.44 It may have
neighbourly – interconnectedness, its panoramic diversity as well as its embeddedness within contexts larger than that of the nation. Paraphrasing Gertrude Stein, Beer speaks of ‘the formal reordering of the earth when seen from the aeroplane – a reordering which does away with centrality and very largely with borders’; as she continues to explain, ‘[it] is an ordering at the opposite extreme from that of the island, in which centrality is emphasized and the enclosure of land within surrounding shores is the controlling meaning’ (1990: 265). Postmodern technologies have
that both were acquainted with the influential modernist Gertrude Stein, visiting her salon in the rue de Fleurus in Paris.54 Although neither Borden nor La Motte can be accused of offering their services to the military medical effort merely to acquire material for publication, both were deeply attached to their writing careers, and Borden, in particular, saw herself primarily as an author, rather than as a nurse. For these women, their experience of nursing fuelled their creativity. A third period of nurses’ writings, in the 1960s and 1970s, was, perhaps, a
]re, moreover, restricted to a single language’, 88 and he might have added that language was English. Those redefinitions of modernism construct a high modernism that is far less experimental and more conservative – in other words, more ‘realistic’ – than it actually was and tend to avoid writers such as André Gide, Gertrude Stein, Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud and many others who would seriously compromise the picture. One solution to this dilemma is to lift such writers out of modernism altogether and make