Genevieve Abravanel
Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA 17603-2827)
FT-54662-06
Summer Stipends
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$5,000 (approved)
$5,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
6/1/2006 – 8/31/2006
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Atlantic Modernism: Americanization and English Literature in the Early Twentieth Century
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.
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