Download Free The American Experiment And The Idea Of Democracy In British Culture 1776 1914 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The American Experiment And The Idea Of Democracy In British Culture 1776 1914 and write the review.

In nineteenth-century Britain, the effects of democracy in America were seen to spread from Congress all the way down to the personal habits of its citizens. Bringing together political theorists, historians, and literary scholars, this volume explores the idea of American democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. The essays span the period from Independence to the First World War and trace an intellectual history of Anglo-American relations during that period. Leading scholars trace the hopes and fears inspired by the American model of democracy in the works of commentators, including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Charles Dilke, Matthew Arnold, Henry James and W. T. Stead. By examining the context of debates about American democracy and notions of ’culture’, citizenship, and race, the collection sheds fresh light on well-documented moments of British political history, such as the Reform Acts, the Abolition of Slavery Act, and the Anti-Corn Law agitation. The volume also explores the ways in which British Liberalism was shaped by the American example and draws attention to the importance of print culture in furthering radical political dialogue between the two nations. As the comprehensive introduction makes clear, this collection makes an important contribution to transatlantic studies and our growing sense of a nineteenth-century modernity shaped by an Atlantic exchange. It is an essential reference point for all interested in the history of the idea of democracy, its political evolution, and its perceived cultural consequences.
Novel Politics aims to change the current consensus of thinking about the nineteenth-century novel. This assumes that the novel is structured by bourgeois ideology and morality, so that its default position is conservative and hegemonic. Such critique comes alike from Marxists, readers of nineteenth-century liberalism, and critics making claims for the working-class novel, and systematically under-reads democratic imaginations and social questioning in novels of the period. To undo such readings means evolving a new praxis of critical writing. Rather than addressing the explicitly political and deeply limited accounts of the machinery of franchise and ballot in texts, it is important to create a poetics of the novel that opens up its radical aspects. This can be done partly by taking a new look at some classic nineteenth-century political texts (Mill, De Tocqueville, Hegel), but centrally by exploring four claims: the novel is an open Inquiry (compare philosophical Inquiries of the Enlightenment contemporary with the novel's genesis), a lived interrogation, not a pre-formed political document; radical thinking requires radical formal experiment, creating generic and ideological disruption simultaneously and putting the so-called realist novel and its values under pressure; the poetics of social and phenomenological space reveals an analysis of the dispossessed subject, not the bildung of success or overcoming; the presence of the aesthetic and art works in the novel is a constant source of social questioning. Among texts discussed, six novels of illegitimacy, from Jane Austen to Scott to George Eliot and George Moore, stand out because illegitimacy, with its challenge to social norms, is a test case for the novelist, and a growing point of the democratic imagination.
As the meeting point between Europe, colonial America, and Africa, the history of the Atlantic world is a constantly shifting arena, but one which has been a focus of huge and vibrant debate for many years. In over thirty chapters, all written by experts in the field, The Atlantic World takes up these debates and gathers together key, original scholarship to provide an authoritative survey of this increasingly popular area of world history. The book takes a thematic approach to topics including exploration, migration and cultural encounters. In the first chapters, scholars examine the interactions between groups which converged in the Atlantic world, such as slaves, European migrants and Native Americans. The volume then considers questions such as finance, money and commerce in the Atlantic world, as well as warfare, government and religion. The collection closes with chapters examining how ideas circulated across and around the Atlantic and beyond. It presents the Atlantic as a shared space in which commodities and ideas were exchanged and traded, and examines the impact that these exchanges had on both people and places. Including an introductory essay from the editors which defines the field, and lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings and maps this accessible volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of this broad sweep of world history.
Many Victorian novels take place not in the steam-powered railway present of that era, but in the recent past: a world moving by stage and mail coach. Ruth Livesey explores the historical consciousness of such works by Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy, and explains how they convey an idea of a national belonging through a sense of local place.
Drawing on rich archival research, this book explores how the elite network of the Pilgrims Society - whose members included J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie - attempted to influence the Anglo-American relationship in the days before it became special'.
"John Wilkes Booth fired his fatal shot on the evening of April 14, 1865, and as the news reached nearly every corner of the globe, President Abraham Lincoln lay dying. Pervasive sympathy for America-and the martyred Lincoln-provoked restless agitation for democratic reform on both sides of the Atlantic. While most readers are familiar with Reconstruction as a deeply contested domestic struggle, Viva Lincoln: The Legacy of the Civil War and the New Birth of Freedom Abroad by historian Don H. Doyle explains how the Union victory helped drive European imperialism from the Americas, bring slavery to an end in Latin America, and spark a wave of democratic reforms in Europe. The 1860s proved to be a crucial decade in the history of democracy. While Reconstruction reforms were implemented to establish the American South on firm republican principles; internationally, a contagious flurry of democratic reforms and revolutions in Britain, Spain, France, and Italy made democracy the wave of the future. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Doyle argues, the United States had forsaken the main achievements of Reconstruction as new theorists and politicians reconciled democratic principles and white supremacy in the new Jim Crow era. The United States, once a model of democratic reform, became a model for mass segregation, racialized disenfranchisement, and immigration restriction. Grounded in extensive diplomatic correspondence, US and foreign legislative debates, international newspapers, and hundreds of speeches, memoirs, biographies, contemporary books, and pamphlets, Viva Lincoln will be the first general-interest global history of Reconstruction from Lincoln's assassination to Jim Crow"--
This book examines how intangible aspects of international relations – including identity, memory, representation, and symbolic perception – have helped to shape the development and contribute to the endurance of the Anglo-American special relationship. Challenging traditional interpretations of US-UK relations and breaking new ground with fresh analyses of cultural symbols, discourses, and ideologies, this volume fills important gaps in our collective understanding of the special relationship’s operation and exposes new analytical spaces in which we can re-evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Designed to breathe new life into old debates about the relationship’s purported specialness, this book offers a multidisciplinary exploration of literary representations, screen representations, political representations, representations in memory, and the influence of cultural connections and constructs which have historically animated Anglo-American interaction.
This book will be the first to examine the variety of British international thought, its continuities and innovations. The editors combine new essays on familiar thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke with important but neglected writers and publicists such as Travers Twiss, James Bryce, and Lowes Dickinson.
This book explores the hopes, desires, and imagined futures that characterized British radicalism in the 1790s, and the resurfacing of this sense of possibility in the following decades. The articulation of “Jacobin” sentiments reflected the emotional investments of men and women inspired by the French Revolution and committed to political transformation. The authors emphasize the performative aspects of political culture, and the spaces in which mobilization and expression occurred – including the club room, tavern, coffeehouse, street, outdoor meeting, theater, chapel, courtroom, prison, and convict ship. America, imagined as a site of republican citizenship, and New South Wales, experienced as a space of political exile, widened the scope of radical dreaming. Part 1 focuses on the political culture forged under the shifting influence of the French Revolution. Part 2 explores the afterlives of British Jacobinism in the year 1817, in early Chartist memorialization of the Scottish “martyrs” of 1794, and in the writings of E. P. Thompson. The relationship between popular radicals and the Romantics is a theme pursued in several chapters; a dialogue is sustained across the disciplinary boundaries of British history and literary studies. The volume captures the revolutionary decade’s effervescent yearning, and its unruly persistence in later years.