Overview
- Presents a transnational analysis of nineteenth-century British and Belgian literature, culture and art
- Analyses periodicals, newspapers and visual material to understand Belgo-British relations
- Examines a wide range of novels and poetry from British and Belgian authors
Part of the book series: Britain and the World (BAW)
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Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book highlights the ways in which Britain and Belgium became culturally entangled as a result of their interaction in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. In the course of the nineteenth century, the battlefields of Waterloo and Ypres in Belgium became veritable burial grounds for generations of dead British military, indirectly leading to the most intensive ties between the two countries. By exploring this twofold path, the author uncovers a series of cross-influences and creative similarities within the Belgo-British artistic community, and explores the background against which the British national identity was constructed. Revealing unknown links between some of the most famous artists on both sides of the channel, such as D.G. Rossetti and Jan Van Eyck; Christina Rossetti and Fernand Khnopff; John Millais and Pieter Breughel, and Lewis Carroll and Quentin Massys, the book emphasises an artistic cross-fertilisation that can be found within battlefield literature throughout the nineteenth century, including examples from the likes of William M. Thackeray, Frances Trollope and Charlotte Brontë. Providing a rich intercultural history of Belgo-British relations after the battle of Waterloo, this interdisciplinary book will appeal to scholars and students researching history, literature, art and cultural studies.
Reviews
—Professor Mark W. Turner, King's College London, UK
"This surprising and fascinating study brings to light the deep entanglement over a long period of British and Belgian experience and writing. It illuminates that history and suggests new ways of thinking about our present situation."
—Professor Dame Gillian Beer, Clare Hall, Cambridge, UK
“Navigating between two of the world's most defining battlefields, Waterloo and Ypres, this book is a wonderful discovery of the strong cultural entanglements between Belgium and Britain in the nineteenth century. Innovative and revealing too is the literary analysis of the war poetry generated by those Belgian battlefields in view of the construction of Britishness."
—Peter Piot KCMG, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Marysa Demoor is Full Professor Emerita of English Literature and Culture at Ghent University in Belgium, where, since 1995, she has been the Director of the Centre for Gender Studies. She has published widely on Victorian and modernist culture, including the books Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-fashioning (Palgrave, 2004) and The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (Palgrave, 2009).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918
Book Subtitle: Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements
Authors: Marysa Demoor
Series Title: Britain and the World
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87926-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-87925-9Published: 22 March 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-87928-0Published: 23 March 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-87926-6Published: 21 March 2022
Series ISSN: 2947-7182
Series E-ISSN: 2947-7190
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 288
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations, 24 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, European History, World History, Global and Transnational History, Cultural History, Memory Studies