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
7 - On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
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
To understand the meaning of love today it is not enough to understand the meaning of love today. We must also understand how the self, frontiers, the world and love all interlock. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014: 183)
In the context of a post-9/11 world, where Western discourses and politics are often defined by an intolerance of cultural otherness and an emphasis on the power of borders, cosmopolitanism has been intensely discussed as a multilayered philosophical, moral and social perspective mainly concerned with such issues as transnational mobility, hospitality, multiculturalism and global justice. These dimensions and concerns suggest a broad definition of cosmopolitanism as ‘a condition of openness to the world’, which entails ‘self and societal transformation in light of the encounter with the Other’ (Delanty 2012: 336). From a primarily cultural perspective, cosmopolitanism emerges as a new kind of identity, as well as ‘a new kind of everyday space–time experience and of human sociability’, defined by a significant loosening of national identifications and a genuine and positive engagement with otherness and difference (Beck 2002: 30).
In an attempt to redefine the mostly theoretical dimension of the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism within the social sciences, some recent critical trends have moved in the direction of material analyses of the concept by highlighting the ways in which cosmopolitanism is performed in people's everyday lives. In contrast to universal and abstract formulations of cosmopolitanism, a number of critics have called for particularised accounts of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins 1998): in other words, for definitions of cosmopolitanisms that are historically situated, geographically grounded and embedded in material everyday practices (Skrbiš and Woodward 2013; Nava 2007; Appiah 2006). In a similar vein, Ulrich Beck and Nathan Sznaider (2016) have also argued for a critical need to pay more systematic attention to the cosmopolitan condition of real people. Seen in this light, cosmopolitanism cannot just be interpreted as a cultural and political disposition but must also be viewed as a physical orientation to the world (Molz 2006), as an active engagement in opening up to the ‘world of the other’ and the ‘allure of difference’ (Nava 2007: 19).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 121 - 137Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020