Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire

Resource Information

The work Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire

Title remainder

the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire

Statement of responsibility

Genevieve Abravanel

Creator

• Abravanel, Genevieve, 1975-

Subject

• English literature -- American influences
• Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain
• National characteristics, British, in literature

Language

eng

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."--Jacket

Member of

• Modernist literature & culture

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

820.9/35873

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PR129.A4

LC item number

A27 2012

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Modernist literature & culture