Eyes Across the Channel

Download or read book Eyes Across the Channel written by Clare A. Simmons and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using interpretations of the French Revolution as a model, Eyes Across the Channel asks what history meant to Victorian Britain, how events became enshrined with the authority of history and how such cultural assumptions might help us to read nineteenth-century British literature. Britain and France are now joined by a tunnel, yet the narrow stretch of sea that divides the two countries has for centuries represented both closeness and difference. Eyes Across the Channel argues that between the July Revolution of 1830 and the actual beginning of the construction of a Channel Tunnel in 1882, Britons more frequently interpreted France's role as their closest continental neighbour historically and politically than geographically.