Love Across the Atlantic 6216_Brickman.indd i 30/01/20 12:30 PM 6216_Brickman.indd ii 30/01/20 12:30 PM Love Across the Atlantic US–UK Romance in Popular Culture Edited by Barbara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn and Theodore Louis Trost 6216_Brickman.indd iii 30/01/20 12:30 PM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Barbara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn and Theodore Louis Trost, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5207 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5209 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5210 6 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 6216_Brickman.indd iv 30/01/20 12:30 PM Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii The Contributors xii Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture 1 Barbara Jane Brickman, Deborah Jermyn and Theodore Louis Trost 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 19 Karen Randell and Alexis Weedon 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances 38 Veera Mäkelä 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers 53 William Brown 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy 69 Caroline Bainbridge 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 91 Martha Shearer 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London 106 Frances Smith 6216_Brickman.indd v 30/01/20 12:30 PM vi CONTENTS 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011) 121 Manuela Ruiz 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday 138 Deborah Jermyn 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 159 Jay Bamber 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom 176 Alice Guilluy 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series 194 Inmaculada Pérez-Casal 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders 209 Theodore Louis Trost 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 227 Shelley Cobb 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance 243 Hannah Hamad 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship 258 Neil Ewen 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain 275 Nathalie Weidhase Index 291 6216_Brickman.indd vi 30/01/20 12:30 PM Figures 1.1. Elinor Glyn and the Rawhide miners, from Elinor Glyn, A Biography 24 1.2. Titanic and Olympic in the Thompson graving dock while the Titanic is under construction 25 1.3. Grand staircase of the Olympic 27 1.4. Cunard poster featuring cross-section of the Aquitania 30 1.5. Lobby card for 6 Days, Charles Brabin’s film adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s novel 32 7.1. Mobile intimacies: (dis)connections across the Atlantic, from Like Crazy 129 7.2. Bordering the space of transatlantic romance, from Like Crazy 131 7.3. Love at a distance: redefining romantic protocols across borders, from Like Crazy 131 7.4. Liquid love in a world of borders, from Like Crazy 134 8.1. Annie’s London home, 23 Egerton Terrace, in 2019 150 8.2. The White Horse in Shere commemorates the seat where Graham realises Amanda did not go back to the US after all 152 8.3. Visitors to Shere will find ‘This is the site of the cottage in the film “The Holiday”’ 153 12.1. The Beatles arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 7 February 1964 212 15.1. Donald Trump as Rose Dewitt Bukater from Brexit: A Titanic Disaster 259 15.2. Nigel Farage toasts Donald Trump with a bottle of Trump wine 268 6216_Brickman.indd vii 30/01/20 12:30 PM Acknowledgements The genesis of this book can be traced back to the 2014 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR), ‘Rethinking Love, Rereading the Romance’, held at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Serendipitously, this provided an opportunity for two transatlantic scholars, from two institutions with a transatlantic partner- ship, to have their own ‘meet-cute’, bringing together Deborah Jermyn (from the University of Roehampton, London) and Catherine Roach (from the University of Alabama). That this meeting was facilitated in Greece – where, for nearly three thousand years, the terms Eros, Philia and Agape ‘have been used in the West to triangulate the shifting concept called “romantic love” not just in philosophy and theology, but also in popular culture’ (IASPR 2014) – speaks to the inevitably global dimen- sions both of US–UK collaboration and of interdisciplinary reflection on what constitutes ‘romance’. Most importantly for the purposes of this collection, this meeting enabled us to start to ponder how our mutual interests in Romance Studies might provide a springboard to enrich our institutional partnership. Given our geographical locations, and the fact that one objective of such international university alliances is, in essence, to woo the other affiliate, a project on transatlantic romance seemed the perfect match. So it was that in June 2017, twenty-two scholars working in diverse fields incorporating Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Literary Studies, TV Studies, Gender Studies and Religious Studies, and drawn from across the US, UK and continental Europe, gathered at the University of Roehampton for ‘Love Across the Atlantic: An Interdisciplinary Confer- ence on US–UK Romance’, co-convened by Jermyn and Roach. What followed was a day rich in deliberation, the exchange of ideas and collabo- rative promise, as the multitude of possible ways into better understanding the infinite nuances and evocative instances of the ‘special relationship’ became apparent. A collection dedicated to chronicling some of the work 6216_Brickman.indd viii 30/01/20 12:30 PM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix undertaken that day was the obvious next step, and we are delighted that many of the illuminating papers given at the conference are gathered in this volume. Our first thanks as co-editors, then, are due to the committee and dele- gates of the 2014 IASPR conference, most especially conference chair Betty Kaklamanidou, and to Catherine Roach, whose enthusiasm for further col- laboration between the Universities of Roehampton and Alabama brought the three of us together. We are grateful to the International Offices of our respective institutions and to colleagues in our home departments for fostering and encouraging the partnership that has facilitated this project. At the University of Roehampton, additional thanks are especially due to the Southlands Methodist Trust, whose generous grant enabled Theodore Louis Trost to participate in the London conference. In addition, at Edinburgh University Press we are indebted to Gillian Leslie, who wholeheartedly supported the idea for this collection from our earliest conversations; to Richard Strachan for his unfailingly atten- tive guidance throughout the writing and production process; and to our anonymous readers, whose instructive and positive feedback helped us shape some of the unruly and expansive territory of the special rela- tionship into the more manageable contours of the final volume consti- tuted here. Inevitably, we can only hope to have scratched the surface of a topic with such a long history and so many intense and, at times, conten- tions interconnections. And in this respect, we are grateful finally, too, to all our authors, who have written with insight, originality and energy through a historical juncture in which the ‘special relationship’ has taken on momentous new dimensions; their contributions together provide an invaluable account of some of the exemplary romantic texts, encounters and individuals that have paved the pathway here, and leave us with much to savour and contemplate as we ponder just what the next chapter of the US–UK ‘love story’ may be. Barbara Jane Brickman would like to thank, first and foremost, the co-convenors of the ‘Love Across the Atlantic’ conference (and our first transatlantic match), Catherine Roach and Deborah Jermyn, who inspired me to become involved in this project and share an enlightening and invigorating scholarly adventure over the last few years. They both have become that priceless combination of both mentor and friend, a gift for which I will always be grateful. We Yanks were especially well looked after in Roehampton at the 2017 conference, so much heartfelt appreci- ation goes to the staff and our colleagues south of the Thames and, of course, to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama 6216_Brickman.indd ix 30/01/20 12:30 PM x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS for making my travel possible.