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.
Author(s): Marysa Demoor
Series: Britain and the World
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 297
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
1 Introduction: The Special Relationship Between Britain and Belgium
Objectives
Scholarly Context
2 British Identity in Belgian Soil
The Location of Identity
Before Waterloo
Writing the Journey
3 Waterloo Visitors, the Immediate Aftermath
Waterloo: Naming the Battlefield
William Wordsworth: A Brief Poetic Inspiration
Robert Southey: Pursuing Fame at Waterloo
Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron: Opposites Will Meet
Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo
4 The Fiction of Belgium
The Trollopes in Belgium
William Makepeace Thackeray in Search of Vanity
5 The Allure of the Middle Ages: The PRB Meet Van Eyck, Inc.
William Morris Discovers Medieval Flanders50
6 A Royal Example—Creating a European Family
The Brontë Theory21
Unmasking Leopold II
7 Surrealist Entanglements
Grotesque Attraction
James Ensor, “Master of Darkness”
8 From Ashes to Soil to Mud
War Graves, War Mud, War Poems
Mud as a Mother
9 “There Is No Art More Exciting Than English Art”: British–Belgian Artistic Liaisons, 1890–1919
Olivier Destrée, Unknown Belgian Link
Raphael Petrucci, Echoes from the East
Fernand Khnopff, Symbolist Painter, and Belgian Anglophile
Henry James, an American in Britain63
Royal Connections, Again
10 Epilogue: The Colour of National Identity
Endorsements of A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918
Select Bibliography
Index
