| Description |
xii, 206 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. |
| Series |
Modernist literature & culture |
|
Modernist literature & culture.
|
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Ameritopias : transatlantic fictions of England's future -- Jazzing Britain : the transatlantic jazz invasion and the remaking of Englishness -- The entertainment empire : Britain's Hollywood between the wars -- English by example : F.R. Leavis and the Americanization of modern England -- Make it old : inventing Englishness in Four Quartets. |
| Summary |
"How did Great Britain, which entered the twentieth century as a dominant empire, reinvent itself in reaction to its fears and fantasies about the United States? Investigating the anxieties caused by the invasion of American culture--from jazz to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films--during the first half of the twentieth century, Genevieve Abravanel theorizes the rise of the American Entertainment Empire as a new style of imperialism that threatened Britain's own. In the early twentieth century, the United States excited a range of utopian and dystopian energies in Britain. Authors who might ordinarily seem to have little in common--H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf--began to imagine Britain's future through America. Abravanel explores how these novelists fashioned transatlantic fictions as a response to the encroaching presence of Uncle Sam. She then turns her attention to the arrival of jazz after World War I, showing how a range of writers, from Elizabeth Bowen to W.H. Auden, deployed the new music as a metaphor for the modernization of England. The global phenomenon of Hollywood film proved even more menacing than the jazz craze, prompting nostalgia for English folk culture and a lament for Britain's literary heritage. Abravanel then refracts British debates about America through the writing of two key cultural critics: F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot. In so doing, she demonstrates the interdependencies of some of the most cherished categories of literary study--language, nation, and artistic value--by situating the high-low debates within a transatlantic framework."--book jacket. |
| Subject |
English literature -- American influences.
|
|
National characteristics, British, in literature.
|
|
Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain.
|
| ISBN |
9780199754458 (acid-free paper) |
|
0199754454 (acid-free paper) |
|
