Atlantic Modernism: Americanization and English Literature in the Early Twentieth Century

FAIN: FT-54662-06

Genevieve Abravanel
Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA 17603-2827)

In John Osborne’s landmark 1956 play, “Look Back in Anger,” the disillusioned English shopkeeper, Jimmy, announces that all of England is living “in the American Age.” Yet only a few decades earlier, many in Britain believed their nation to be a progressive society which its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. What were the effects of this transition from the height of imperial confidence to Jimmy’s bleak announcement? In “Atlantic Modernism,” I consider how English anxieties over what Stuart Hall has called the Anglo-American “shift in fortunes” served to redefine the meaning of English literature by helping to produce the modern concepts of elite and popular culture.

Associated Products

Americanizing Britain (The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire) (Book)
Title: Americanizing Britain (The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire)
Author: Genevieve Abravanel
Editor: Kevin J.H. Dettmar
Editor: Mark Wollaeger
Abstract: 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, Abravanel theorizes the rise of the American Enter-tainment Empire as a new style of imperialism that threatened Britian's own.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780199754458
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Book)
Title: A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation
Author: Abravanel, Genevieve
Year: 2010
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9780521193924
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780521193924

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