'This Is Not the Country It Was When Labour Returned to Power in 1997'
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Summary
When I came here, "he says now, "England struck me as a country bound together, even made up by, a network of reciprocal 'allusions' (it was the only word I could think of): localities, institutions, festivals, foods, character-types, historical references and antagonisms, class indicators and suchlike.
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'This Is Not the Country It Was When Labour Returned to Power in 1997'
Returning to America after an absence of 20 years, Henry James wrote, in The American Scene (1907), of his unease at the arrival in New York of so many non-English-speaking Jews from Europe. He observed them on the street, in shops and together in their neighbourhoods and ghettos, and feared not only for the future of America but for the English language itself, especially the language of literature. "There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds."
James was disconcerted by what he considered to be these new arrivals' sense of "settled possession", which he found "presumptuous, monstrous", and which contrasted with his own feelings of unsettled possession. he regretted how established Americans would inevitabl...See the full content of this document
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