Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880-1940: Channel Packets ed. by Andrew Radford and Victoria Reid (review)

This volume's engaging subtitle takes its inspiration from Raymond Mortimer's pieces on cultural traffic published in Channel Packet in 1942, and from the steam packets that traversed the Channel carrying mail and passengers. The focus of the present collection is on various other types of 'packets' — newspapers, literary magazines and periodicals, translation, correspondence, and book commerce — all engendering cultural interplay during the six decades under review. This period represents a high point in European cultural production, commerce, primacy, and rivalry, one that has necessarily generated a vast amount of historical and critical attention. Although France and Britain were necessarily locked in political, economic, and cultural dialogue with the world and their own empires, they continued to engage, as in previous centuries, in a tête-à-tête. This intimate exchange endures to the present day, whether the two countries appear to snub, ignore, or deliberately irritate one another, or indulge in games of superiority/inferiority, or whether they allow themselves to praise and enjoy each other's inventiveness and creativity, or create space for mutual learning. All these dynamics are represented here. How, though, to say something new both about the immensely fertile modern European period and about Franco-British cultural exchanges? Various approaches are taken. One is to consider responses to literary and artistic creativity either across a specific period, in this instance English responses to French poetry between decadence and modernism (Jennifer Higgins), or at a particular moment, namely, book reviews, and literary exchanges around 1908 (Richard Hibbitt). Another is to consider forms of exchange between writers: Valéry Larbaud and Thomas Hardy (David Roe), Marcel Schwob and Robert Louis Stevenson (Victoria Reid). Other contributions focus on (in)famous figures such as Oscar Wilde (Julian Barnes and Hermione Lee; Emily Eells) and Flaubert (Caroline Patey) to consider transpositions, transformations, and reception of their works on one or other side of the channel; or concern the influence of a single culture, here France and Ford Madox Ford (Laura Colombino); or concentrate on a particular genre, namely, English realist fiction in correspondence with André Gide (Patrick Pollard), and the English adventure novel and Alain Fournier (David Steel). Finally, attention is paid to a more neglected figure, Mary Butts, and her charting of interwar Paris in her short stories (Andrew Radford). The collection takes a very literary approach to cross-channel exchange, focusing on high culture, but it also reveals much about perceptions and experiences in Britain and France more generally, during a period when the First World War would provide an ultimate shared experience that was lived, viewed, and represented very differently on each side of the Channel. The editors conclude their lively and well-informed Introduction with reference to Wolfgang Iser's question concerning how the imperative 'to inspect cross-cultural relations' is triggered by an 'awareness of crisis' that becomes a 'prerequisite for knowing that one is embedded in a culture' (p. 16). With the approaching anniversaries of both Agincourt and Waterloo in 2015, it will be as well to be equipped with broad knowledge of our cultural common ground.