Abstract
The history of European anti-Americanism is sometimes cast as an unbroken tradition, where prejudices and negative stereotypes are passed on unchanged from one generation to the next, and where the emotional intensity remains constant at all points in time. Since anti-American discourse does have a strong element of tradition to it, this linear narrative is not entirely mistaken. As we have seen in the previous chapter, it is conspicuous, even as early as in the first half of the nineteenth century, how anti-American writers persistently recycle critical motifs and even narrative forms found in the works of their predecessors, and how they stick to the same, relatively limited vocabulary of prejudices. Yet, the idea of a strict linearity is nevertheless a distortion. Anti-Americanism is constantly evolving and continually reinvents itself in response to developments in Europe, in the United States, and in the nature of transatlantic relations. Historically, it exhibits great fluctuations, not only in terms of prevalence and intensity, but also in terms of what might be called discursive creativity: while some periods are characterized by the rapid development of new critical idioms, others are mainly devoted to exploring, refining, and substantiating these ideas.
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Notes
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (1915) (New York: Octagon, 1975).
Cf. Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), pp. 1–38.
In 1913, the GDP of the United States was greater than that of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany combined, while GDP per capita was higher than in any European country. Cf. Robert E. Gallman, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Stanley L. Engerman & Robert E. Gallman (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), vol. II, pp. 2–6, pp. 18–24.
Cf. Philippe Roger, L’Ennemi américain, pp. 61–62. On the significance of geographical distance for Europe’s perception of the United States, cf. René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1962), pp. 19–30.
David M. Brownstone & Irene M. Franck, Facts about American Immigration (New York & Dublin: H. W. Wilson, 2001), p. 14.
Cf. Rupert Brooke, Letters from America (1916) (London: Hesperus, 2007), p. 3.
Cf. Harald S. Næss, Knut Hamsun og Amerika (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1969), p. 91.
Knut Hamsun, The Cultural Life of Modern America (1889) (trans. Barbara Gordon Morgridge) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969), p. 5. The quotations from this edition have occasionally been modified with reference to the Norwegian original: Knut Hamsun, Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1962).
For a fuller discussion of Gobineau and the role of racism in anti-American thought, cf. James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America (New Haven, CT & London: Yale UP, 1997), pp. 87–105.
Ibid. While the figure given for Norway is roughly correct, infant mortality in the United States was in fact only about a quarter higher and was better than in most European countries. Cf. Samuel H. Preston & Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991), pp. 49–87. Hamsun’s tendentious use of sources is discussed by Harald S. Næss, Knut Hamsun og Amerika, pp. 115–19.
Albert Wolff, Victorien Sardou et L’Oncle Sam (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1874), p. 101.
Jerome A. Hart, Sardou and the Sardou Plays (Philadelphia, PA & London: J. B. Lippincott, 1913), p. 277.
Jules Barbier & Alfred Assollant, Le Dieu Dollar, Le Gaulois, December 24–28, 1871.
On the legal proceedings, cf. Simon Jeune, De F.T. Graindorge à A.O. Barnabooth. Les Types américains dans le Roman et le Théâtre français (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1963), pp. 168–69.
Victorien Sardou, L’Oncle Sam, in Théâtre complet, vol. VII (Paris: Albin Michel, 1936), p. 599.
On anti-Americanism in this context, cf. Maureen E. Montgomery, Gilded Prostitution (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 12.
Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, in D. H. Stewart (ed.), Kipling’s America: Travel Letters, 1889–1895 (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2003).
Oscar Wilde, Impressions of America (Sunderland: Keystone Press, 1906).
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IV (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), p. 87. While this view is attributed to a fictional character, Wilde voices similar ideas about the United States in his own name in two article contributions to the Court and Society Review from 1887, cf. “The American Invasion,” in Miscellanies (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 77–82, and “American Man,” in Stuart Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), pp. 22–27. For a very literal account of the American insensitivity to all things spiritual, cf. Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” (1887), in Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Prose Pieces (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 65–119, which tells the story of “the tribulations of the Ghost of Canterville Chase when his ancestral halls became the home of the American Minister to the Court of St. James.”
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893) (London: Nick Hern, 2005), p. 14.
In conversation. Cf. Alvin Redman (ed.), The Wit and Humour of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover, 1959), p. 123.
Peter Kemp (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), p. 154.
Fred R. Shapiro (ed.), The Yale Book of Quotations (New Haven, CT & London: Yale UP, 2006), p. 704. For further examples of Shaw’s anti-Americanism, cf. his radio address A Little Talk on America (1931) (New York: Friends of the Soviet Union, 1932) and the pamphlet The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home (London: Constable & Co., 1933).
On Shaw’s views on America and his first visit in 1933, cf. Dan H. Laurence, “‘That Awful Country’: Shaw in America,” Shaw, vol. 5 (1985), pp. 279–97.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. III (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), pp. 197–202.
Henrik Ibsen, The Pillars of Society (1877) (trans. Michael Meyer) (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), p. 111. Quotations from this edition have occasionally been modified with reference to the Norwegian original, Samfundets Støtter, in Samlede verker, vol. IV (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1978).
Gerhart Hauptmann, Atlantis (1912) (trans. Adele & Thomas Seltzer) (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), p. 5. Quotations from this edition have occasionally been modified with reference to the German original, Atlantis (Frankfurt/Main & Berlin: Ullstein, 1995). Incidentally, the book version is milder in its views on America than the original serialized version, and the English version tones down the attacks even further.
Cf. H. D. Tschörtner, Ungeheures erhoffi (Berlin: Der Morgen, 1986), p. 105.
For an impressive account of this German obsession with “culture,” cf. Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006).
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© 2011 Jesper Gulddal
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Gulddal, J. (2011). Ambiguous America. In: Anti-Americanism in European Literature. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016027_3
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