Author Description

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.