Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
9 - ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
On 27 November 2017, Clarence House announced that Prince Harry had proposed to American actor Meghan Markle and that they would marry in spring 2018. Their relationship had been officially acknowledged a year earlier on the back of what the Prince's Communication Secretary characterised as a ‘wave of abuse and harassment’ from online trolls and some media pundits (Communication Secretary 2016). By the time of the announcement, the impending royal wedding was being framed as blissfully romantic, with the Prince's declaration that he knew Markle was ‘the one’ the first time they met being circulated across social media (Reslen 2017). Still, it seemed that the media was divided on how to cover the union, partly undermining the pairing in reports marked by ‘racial undertones … and … outright sexism’ (Communication Secretary 2016) and partly swooning over the romantic appeal of what was seen as a highly unlikely and thus especially absorbing pairing (see also Weidhase in this volume).
Some journalists drew parallels between the couple's relationship and that of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson (Rosenwald 2017), whilst others found a more apt comparison in the controversial liaison between Prince Andrew and American actor Koo Stark in the 1980s (Ridley 2017). Regardless of which historical lens journalists employed, the descriptor ‘fairy-tale’ was frequently adopted (Ellison 2017). Many commentators attempted to fit Meghan and Harry's courtship into what Sue Short sees as the quintessential fairy-tale narrative – that of ‘the heroine who rises above misfortune and marries a prince … decisively putting an end to their woes by marrying Prince Charming’ (Short 2014: 21). However, Short's use of the ‘fairy-tale’ descriptor demonstrates the limitations of this outdated framework: for example, by ignoring Markle's long-standing television work – most notably as Rachel Zane on Suits (2011–). Crucially, however, all this shuffling around the media's positioning of the courtship may help account for why other commentators reframed it by turning to a more contemporary, though perhaps equally fantastical, narrative – that of the British–American film production company Working Title romcom (Freeman 2017).
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- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 159 - 175Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020