TY  - BOOK
AU  - Abravanel,Genevieve
TI  - Americanizing Britain: the rise of modernism in the age of the entertainment empire 
T2  - Modernist literature & culture
SN  - 9780190272418 (pbk.)
U1  - 820.935873 22
PY  - 2016///
CY  - Oxford, New York
PB  - Oxford University Press
KW  - English literature
KW  - American influences
KW  - BUEsh
KW  - 20th century
KW  - History and criticism
KW  - Modernism (Literature)
KW  - Great Britain
KW  - United States
KW  - Civilization
KW  - 1918-1945
KW  - In literature
KW  - HHUUEENN
KW  - September2019
KW  - Reading book
N1  - Originally published : 2012; Includes bibliographical references and index
N2  - "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
ER  -