EBOOK Americanizing Britain:The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire

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.