At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed
their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony,
the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar
years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type
of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic
stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the
Hollywood film. Britain's fraught transition from formidable empire
to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary
scholars. However, the dawn of the "American century " is the
period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of
Americanization-from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood
films-helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture
that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus
brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study
of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting
that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American
entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national
culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about
American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain's imperial
scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its
treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the
book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its
ideas of America, and how Britain's literary modernism developed
and changed through this reinvention.
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