Elisa Tamarkin
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226789446
- eISBN:
- 9780226789439
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226789439.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American ...
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This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as the author shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. The author traces the wide-ranging effects of Anglophilia on American literature, art, and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the Civil War. By working beyond narratives of British influence, the author highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, the book argues that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame—a release from the burdens of American culture—but an anachronistic structure of attachment in which U.S. identity was lived in other languages of national expression.Less
This book charts the phenomenon of the love of Britain that emerged after the Revolution and remains in the character of U.S. society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism. But as the author shows, this Anglophilia was more than just an elite nostalgia; it was popular devotion that made reverence for British tradition instrumental to the psychological innovations of democracy. Anglophilia spoke to fantasies of cultural belonging, polite sociability, and, finally, deference itself as an affective practice within egalitarian politics. The author traces the wide-ranging effects of Anglophilia on American literature, art, and intellectual life in the early nineteenth century, as well as its influence in arguments against slavery, in the politics of Union, and in the dialectics of liberty and loyalty before the Civil War. By working beyond narratives of British influence, the author highlights a more intricate culture of American response, one that included Whig elites, college students, radical democrats, urban immigrants, and African Americans. Ultimately, the book argues that the love of Britain was not simply a fetish or form of shame—a release from the burdens of American culture—but an anachronistic structure of attachment in which U.S. identity was lived in other languages of national expression.
David Harrington Watt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780801448270
- eISBN:
- 9781501708541
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801448270.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a ...
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This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a reactionary movement whose intellectual bankruptcy was dramatically revealed in a famous trial about the teaching of evolution. The other two obituaries—Norman F. Furniss' The Fundamentalist Controversy, (1954) and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)—were both written by professional historians. Both books present fundamentalism as a form of Christianity that in the past blocked Americans' search for knowledge; both assert that religious fundamentalism's influence peaked in the 1920s and then went into steep decline.Less
This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a reactionary movement whose intellectual bankruptcy was dramatically revealed in a famous trial about the teaching of evolution. The other two obituaries—Norman F. Furniss' The Fundamentalist Controversy, (1954) and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)—were both written by professional historians. Both books present fundamentalism as a form of Christianity that in the past blocked Americans' search for knowledge; both assert that religious fundamentalism's influence peaked in the 1920s and then went into steep decline.
