The Republican loss of majority status in the U.S. Senate following the mid-term elections of 1986, and the disclosure of the Reagan Administration's secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras, effectively brought to an end six years of senatorial deference to presidential foreign policy-making. From 1981 to 1986 the Republican-controlled Senate had generally afforded President Reagan a degree of latitude in the making of foreign policy which not only contrasted markedly with that of hisimmediate predecessors, but also prepared the atmosphere for the type of adventures pursued by Colonel Oliver North. Whereas the foreign policy initiatives of Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter had been subject to considerable scrutiny by senators, thereby forcing a detailed examination of their consequences, the forbearance shown to the Reagan Administration by the Senate encouraged a much less diligent approach to policy-making.

With these apocryphal words from the proverbial doughboy, Charles Homer Haskins lightened his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1922. Haskins's theme was the historical and historiographical relevance of Europe to Americans, two subjects on which he could speak authoritatively. Dean of the Harvard Graduate School, an outstanding scholar of medievalism and the Mediterranean, Haskins was best known to his contemporaries as a member of Woodrow Wilson's research team at the Paris Peace Conference, the so-called Inquiry. In the course of his address Haskins surveyed the current state of American writing on European history and pronounced it moderately satisfying; but his underlying anxiety could not be disguised. Since he believed that all the “great European wars” had been “in every instance…American wars” and therefore “world wars,” Haskins feared the consequences of any American political and academic neglect of Europe. In Haskins's ambiguous formulation: “European history [was] of profound importance to Americans.”

“It is a great pleasure to write the word:” thus Henry James starts his 1882 essay on Venice. To write the word is to inscribe the name; to inscribe the name is to evoke the place; to evoke the place is – well, “a pleasure.” Or simply – pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? And what is the complex relationship between place, name, and word? In that essay James goes on to assert that “of all the cities of the world [Venice] is the easiest to visit without going there.” He is referring of course to his – to our, to everyone's – inescapable saturation with images and associations of Venice from books and pictures. Venice, of all cities in the western world, is the already written, the already seen. The pleasure of Venice, the pleasure which is Venice, is pre-scribed, pre-viewed. The name permanently pre-empts the place, and, as I shall suggest in relation to Proust, the word finally pre-empts the name. In the discourses with which Proust and James were familiar the word/name “Venice” was a site of semantic excess, over-filled with desires, anticipations, dreams, expectations, experiential appropriations. At the same time it was a site of semantic evacuation, disillusion, loss, deprivation, decline and declinations, experiential expropriations.

I hope to redeem the banality of the second half of my title by immediately particularizing the modern self of which I speak. Forced into high heels, skirts, and corsets, women suffer what Veblen calls “mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.” Writing eight years after Veblen, Henry James in The Amerian Scene, his account of his 1904 travels in America, finds that the American woman “in her manner of embodying or representing her sex” has become “a new human convenience, not unlike the ingenious mechanical appliances.” In 1947 in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the manner in which a teenage American girl keeps “the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation…” as bearing witness to “man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus…personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” One thread connecting these images is the commodity status of women under late capitalism. All three moments can be said to register the depleted subjectivity of those who, in Adorno's words, “have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed all the more entirely by the sphere of consumption.” But this convergence should not obscure significant differences among all three writers, especially between Veblen on the one hand and James and Adorno on the other.

Few figures are more rapidly forgotten than dead journalists, except perhaps dead cartoonists. Yet the graphic work of Sir David Low (1891–1963) has not entirely slipped from memory. He is recalled as the inventor of the contradictory certainties of Colonel Blimp and as a scourge of appeasement. Particularly in the years immediately before, during and after the Second World War he achieved an international reputation. He was not perceived, and did not see himself, as a “funny man” but as a commentator on and analyst of international politics. His cartooning he presented as a form of argument to educate opinion in defence of liberal values and democratic institutions and in favour of rational conduct in international affairs. For these reasons his graphic and print journalism are revealing about the strengths and limitations of the outlook which might be termed “liberal internationalism.” Precisely because of this ideological content the United States became crucial in Low's thought at a time when liberal values and democratic institutions seemed under imminent threat and American capacity to accede to or refuse the role of “successor to John Bull” more apparent.

It is customary to associate Jonathan Edwards with the town of Northampton. That he was born in East Windsor (Conn.), was graduated from Yale College in New Haven, served a Presbyterian church in New York City, wrote his great treatises – A Careful and Strict Enquiry into … Freedom of Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758) – in Stockbridge (Mass.), and died as president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton does not mitigate the local association. For it was in Northampton where Edwards came of age theologically. He served as its minister from 1729 to 1750, following his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, who had served the same parish for the preceding sixty years. As with the one, so with the other: Northampton was Stoddard and it was also Edwards, a dynasty holding sway for over eighty years and commanding the religious spirit up and down the length of the Connecticut Valley.

Early in Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards formulates a description of logical necessity that has important implications for the way we understand both his philosophical and theological method. He describes the principal forms of necessary meaning, delineating three modes of necessity: philosophical, moral and natural. Of these, the first is most important, for it indicates that, at the highest level, meaning is determined according to the structure of a proposition. Edwards states that “philosophical necessity is nothing different from certainty,” and the form of certainty, he tells us, “[is] nothing else than the full and fixed connection between the things signified by the subject and predicate of a proposition.”

Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1588, was referring to the Elizabethan poor whose ranks were newly enlarged by the economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century. His rationale for government-sponsored colonization has hardly been improved upon in the subsequent four hundred years and examples of its application can be found over much of the globe, from Acadians in Louisiana to convicts in Australia. Two hundred and forty years after Hakluyt, the American Colonization Society was founded in Washington, D.C., to encourage the emigration of American free blacks to Africa.

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.

During the first half of the nineteenth century many Americans began to promote the visual arts as a means of defining and fostering national identity. One highly significant consequence of this new aesthetic was the rise of a native genre art which depicted uniquely “American” customs and characters. Focussing upon and interpreting the daily world of average citizens in an emphatically optimistic and ideal manner, these works of art celebrated the virtue, vigor, simplicity, resourcefulness and republicanism of American society. They tended chiefly to represent rural American activities – maple sugaring, quilting frolics, scenes of harvest and the like – and to rely upon a standard cast of characters – the farmer, the housewife, the peddler, the trapper, for example – each of whom exemplified a particular trait or traits that seemed distinctly “American.”

Under the Mormon scheme of things in 1831, somewhere in Indian territory (somewhere it was thought, west of Independence, Missouri) a city was to be built by those who accepted the gospel restored through Joseph Smith, Jr., God's prophet for the latter days. It was to be a city of refuge – a place where the saints would be safe from both the corruptions of the day and the judgement that was to fall upon the world – and a city of righteousness, endowed with the Spirit of the Lord.

In the opening pages of his 1971 study, Politics as Symbolic Action, Murray Edelman underlines his belief that “psychological characteristics, social interaction, and political acts are alternative expressions of the same phenomenon.” In the discussion that follows, however, he tacitly privileges the political aspect of the transaction to an extent that quite undermines his initial image of an interdependent network of reactive/responsive processes. The bias is an understandable one, given his anxiety to counter the naive view of “governmental acts as reflections of people's cognitions.” It is also, unfortunately, a problematic one, insofaras its implication of a self-consciously Machiavellian political leadership deliberately manipulating public affect to its own ends simply substitutes for one misapprehension another equally naive.

It was fate's infallible sense of the ironic which induced Andrew Lang to contact William Dean Howells as a potential contributor to the newly founded Longman's Magazine in October 1882. Ironic, that is, in the light of later events, for the two men barely knew one another at the time, Howells having been introduced to Lang two months previously, at one of Edmund Gosse's celebrated Sunday parties. Had Lang waited for Howells to show his colours, he would, no doubt, have refrained from hauling this Trojan horse into the Longman camp. Indeed, Howells's notorious disparagement of Dickens and Thackeray appeared that same year, in the Century Magazine for November 1882. All but a nonentity to the British public before, the American author thereby achieved fame, almost overnight, as the powerful vindicator of the new American prose and a merciless denunciator of the established British novelists.