France and the construction of the avant-garde in Britain
pp. 68-83
in: Ceri Crossley, Ian Small (eds), Studies in Anglo-French cultural relations, Berlin, Springer, 1988Abstract
Concepts such as "nationality' and the avant-garde need to be handled with caution when they are applied to the history of cultures. They are terms which are frequently used but only infrequently defined. That the values that they suggest, as well as the individuals or groups which they designate, might be subject to change, is an idea rarely entertained. But it seems to be the case that, while the notion of the avant-garde and therefore those allied concepts which define it — the provincial, the metropolitan and the cosmopolitan and so forth — were fairly stable during the last half of the nineteenth century, increasingly during this century they have lost their stability. Historically there is a very strong case for seeing the relationship between the English or British avant-garde and France during the last decades of the nineteenth century in terms of a natural alliance. In the years after 1860 the vanguard of the dominant intellectual, literary and artistic culture of Britain defined itself in terms of a rejection of provincial — that is, basically native — values and (in the term made famous by Matthew Arnold, one of the earliest propagandisers of France in this respect) their accompanying "philistinism'; the natural consequence of this refusal of provincialism was the construction of a specific set of values that were exclusively "metropolitan'.
