Americanizing Britain

The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire

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by Genevieve Abravanel

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Great Britain

Keywords

Great Britain, American influence

Publishing date

2016

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Collection

Modernist Literature and Culture

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 224 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-027241-8

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
Genevieve Abravanel is Associate Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College.

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press