Our American cousin: Anglo -American cultural politics and British national identities

My dissertation argues that in a variety of turn-of-the-century British texts America and Americans play a key strategic function in representing the social and historical processes shaping British culture. America and Americans are depicted, paradoxically, both as repositories for historical stereotypes of the Anglo-Saxon masculine subject and as embodiments of modernity. Authors including Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Bram Stoker, and George Bernard Shaw stage Anglo-American encounters which refigure romanticized Victorian notions of the relations between colonizer and colonial subject. These fictional interactions both depict and assuage British anxieties about America's rapid displacement of Britain's economic and military dominance among the Western nations. By attributing undesirable social forces to the agency of America, the authors I study legitimate a version of masculine British culture which centers their political viewpoints and social aspirations.;In chapter one, "America and Culture in de Toqueville, Dickens, and Arnold," I trace continuities and differences between three famous commentaries upon the United States in the nineteenth century. The second chapter, "Anglo-American Relations and the Travel Narrative," examines representations of the British character in travel writings by turn-of-the-century British authors in America. Chapter three, "Charisma, Imperial Work, and America in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo," examines a shift in Conard's representation of imperial work between Lord Jim (1901) and Nostromo (1904). In the later novel, Conrad critiques the economic development pursued by American interests under the aegis of the Monroe Doctrine. Chapter four, "From Blood to Blotter: Anglo-Saxonism, America, and Arnoldian 'Right Reason' in Bram Stoker's Dracula," argues that in Dracula (1899) Bram Stoker refigures traditional English masculinity as an American cowboy, and this substitution is critical to identifying Britishness with a highly literate version of masculinity. In chapter five, "America and Human Commodities in Henry James' The Golden Bowl," I argue that The Golden Bowl (1904) is a tale of American imperialism displaced into the sphere of private relations. Chapter six, "Shaw's Response: Englishness and America in John Bull's Other Island and The Apple Cart" examines Shaw's changing views of Englishness and the Anglo-American relation.