Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Americanizing Britain : the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire
（Modernist literature & culture / Kevin J.H. Dettmar & Masrk Wollaeger, series editors）
Oxford University Press, c2012
Available at / 16 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain's fraught transition from formidable empire to
victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the "American century " is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization-from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films-helped to establish the categories of elite and
mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain's imperial scope, and what it meant
to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain's literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.
Table of Contents
- Series Editors' Foreword
- Introduction
- Chapter One Ameritopias: Transatlantic Fictions of England's Future
- Chapter Two Jazzing Britain: The Transatlantic Jazz Invasion and the Remaking of Englishness
- Chapter Three The Entertainment Empire: Britain's Hollywood between the Wars
- Chapter Four English by Example: F.R. Leavis and the Americanization of Modern England
- Chapter Five Make it Old: Inventing Englishness in Four Quartets
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
