Americanizing Britain :
Abravanel, Genevieve, 1975-
Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire / Genevieve Abravanel. - xii, 206 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm. - Modernist literature & culture .
Originally published : 2012.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"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.
9780190272418 (pbk.)
English literature--American influences.
English literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.
United States--Civilization--1918-1945.
United States--In literature.
--Reading book
820.935873 / ABR
Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire / Genevieve Abravanel. - xii, 206 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm. - Modernist literature & culture .
Originally published : 2012.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"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.
9780190272418 (pbk.)
English literature--American influences.
English literature--History and criticism.--20th century
Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.
United States--Civilization--1918-1945.
United States--In literature.
--Reading book
820.935873 / ABR