Love Across the Atlantic

Barbara Jane Brickman is Associate Professor of Media and Gender Studies at the University of Alabama. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, The Journal of Film and Video, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Since the publication of her first book, New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in 1970s Film, she has written a volume on the film Grease for the Cinema and Youth Cultures series. She is also the founder and director of the Druid City Girls Media Camp in Tuscaloosa, AL.

Winston Churchill famously described the political alliance between the US and UK as a 'special relationship', but throughout the cultural history of these two countries there have existed transatlantic 'special relationships' of another kind - affairs between British and American citizens who have fallen in love, with one another but often too with the idea(l) of that other place across the ocean.
From romantic novelist Elinor Glyn in the 1920s to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today, this collection examines some of the history, contemporary manifestations and enduring appeal of US-UK romance across popular culture. Looking at both historical and contemporary case studies, drawn from across film, television, music, literature, news and politics, this is a timely intervention into the popular romantic discourse of US-UK relations, at a critical and transitional moment in the ongoing viability of the special relationship.

Barbara Jane Brickman is Associate Professor of Media and Gender Studies at the University of Alabama. Deborah Jermyn is Reader in Film and TV at the University of Roehampton, where she is Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures. Theodore Louis Trost is Professor in New College and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabamama.

Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; List of Contributors; INTRODUCTION: Still crazy after all these years?: The 'special relationship' in popular media; 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', Karen Randell and Alexis Weedon; 2: 'World Turned Upside Down: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale's Regency-Set', Veera Mäkelä; 3: 'Bridget Jones's Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We're Brexiteers', William Brown; 4: 'Sharon Horgan, postfeminism and the transatlantic psycho-politics of "woemantic" comedy', 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', Martha Shearerl; 6: 'Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London', Frances Smith'; 7: 'On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus's Like Crazy (2011)', Manuela Ruiz; 8: 'The mise-en-scène of romance and transatlantic desire: exploring genre, space and place in Nancy Meyers's The Parent Trap and The Holiday', Deborah Jermyn; PART THREE: Two lovers divided by a common language: 'British-ness', 'American-ness' and identity; 9: '"American, a slut, and out of your league": Working Title's equivocal relationship with Americanness', Jay Bamber; 10: '"It's the American Dream": British audiences and the contemporary Hollywood rom-com', Alice Guilluy; 11: 'Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas's Wallflowers Series', Inmaculada Pérez-Casal; 12: 'Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon, and love across borders', 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', Shelley Cobb; 14: '"I Will Be with You, Whatever": Blair and Bush's Baghdadi Bromance', Hannah Hamad; 15: 'Holding hands as the ship sinks: Trump and May's special relationship', Neil Ewen; 16: '"Harry has gone over to the dark side": Race, Royalty and US-UK Romance in Brexit Britain', Nathalie Weidhase