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
2 - ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
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
A small surge of American heroines arose in the subgenre of Regency romance in 2016: Eloisa James's My American Duchess (2016) appeared around the same time as Maya Rodale's Lady Bridget's Diary (2016a), the first in her ‘Keeping Up with the Cavendishes’ series. The feisty heroines of these novels charm readers just as thoroughly as they do their heroes but their appearance also raises some intriguing questions: Why the Regency? Why not simply set the novels in America? Why heroines from America, specifically, as opposed to other British colonies? The answers to these questions simply may be that the Regency is an exceedingly popular setting and the authors of these novels are themselves American; therefore, it is logical that their heroines would share the authors’ nationality and be placed in a familiar setting, one already recognised and loved by a wide readership.
I propose, however, that there is more to the matter, specifically in terms of the Regency setting. As Pamela Regis writes in connection with Georgette Heyer's historical romances,
Regency details inform the heroine, the hero, and the core of the romance itself – the courtship. At the same time, however, heroine, hero, and courtship inform the setting. Heroine, hero, and their courtship throw the setting into high relief; characters and their actions comment on the setting. (Regis 2003: 127)
The nationalities of the heroines and the heroes are crucial, then; in this case, they lend a particular significance to the setting. The high society of the Regency period, in the form it is depicted in historical romance, is ordered by the aristocracy with strict rules of conduct. There are double standards everywhere: the rules are stricter for women than men, and the control the older women ostensibly have in the ballroom wavers under the influence of high-ranking men. This patriarchal set-up is upset by the entrance of Americans, who subscribe to a different ideology altogether. American characters are best suited to making political statements in a Regency setting, as the collision of British and American differences forces a conflict. Recently independent of monarchy, their disregard for aristocracy and their inevitably different attitudes towards autonomy and rebellion not only make for amusing situations but also call the status quo into question.
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- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 38 - 52Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020