America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature [Paperback]

In an innovative reading of fin-de-siecle cultural texts, Miller argues that British representations of America, Americans, and Anglo-American relations at the turn of the twentieth century provided an important forum for cultural distinction.Introduction The Travel Book: Performing British Culture in America and on the Page Commerce, Reunion, and the Anglo-American Public Sphere The White Atlantic: Anglo-Saxon Racialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Modernity, Fabulation, and America in Dracula Holroyd's Man: Tradition, Fetishization, and the United States in Nostromo Americanization and Henry James Conclusion

Miller offers an original and compelling account of Anglo-American cultural relations at the fin-de-si?cle. He excels in bringing out the ways in which British commentators and novelists established their national identity against that of their transatlantic counterparts. With a strong grasp of the political and economic context, Miller s able close readings of both unusual and familiar texts explore the tensions that animated the edgy rivalry between these two countries, whether in relation to modernity and tradition, egalitarianism and vulgarity, or the growing commercial and imperialistic rivalries that were expressed in both high and popular cultural forms. - Kate Flint, Professor, Department of English, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

In America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Century Literature, Brook Miller illustrates the extent to which the crisis in British intellectual and political discourse at the end of the Victorian era was shaped by the emergence of the United States as an economic, military and (to a lesser extent) cultural superpower at the very moment when certainties about Britain s global pre-eminence were starting to be questioned. Drawing upon a complex matrix of Anglo-American relationships, Miller reads travel writing, political philosophy, economic tracts, fiction and many othel£)