Table of Contents

Series Editors' Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One Ameritopias: Transatlantic Fictions of England's Future

Chapter Two Jazzing Britain: The Transatlantic Jazz Invasion and the Remaking of Englishness

Chapter Three The Entertainment Empire: Britain's Hollywood between the Wars

Chapter Four English by Example: F.R. Leavis and the Americanization of Modern England

Chapter Five Make it Old: Inventing Englishness in Four Quartets

Afterword

Notes

Index

About the Author

Genevieve Abravanel is Associate Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College.

Reviews

"Abravanel persuasively and engagingly demonstrates we may even see this figuration--the US as an oppositional space, as modernity, as the future--as one of the fundamental thematic and ideological underpinnings of British literary modernism itself. Across a fascinating and diverse range of writers, including H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and, most especially and complicatedly, T. S.
Eliot, Abravanel follows the image of America like a vivid thread running through the motley tapestry of British modernist writing." --American Literary History
"[A] compelling case for the role Americanization played in Great Britain's sense of national self.... Abravanel's lucidly written, closely argued text will be an invaluable resource.... Highly recommended." --CHOICE
"In this absorbing and clear-eyed study, Genevieve Abravanel shows us how key works of British modernism warded off an 'American Age' whose image they fixed by opposing. Reactivating the links between Leavis and the New Critics, she also reads present-day features of the U.S. and U.K. literary academies as enduring symptoms of the modernist moment. Americanizing Britain achieves something that few scholarly studies do: it alters the story of its own
institutional preconditions, making Anglophone literary studies strange to itself." --Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of The Copywrights
"It is a commonplace of twentieth-century history that Britain has been conquered and colonized by American mass culture. But in this thoughtful and nuanced contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon, Genevieve Abravanel persuasively demonstrates how a distinctive British form of literary modernism developed to counter the perceived effects of Americanization and in the process re-imagined Englishness." --Jeffrey Richards, author of Films and
British National Identity
"Essential, solid, and penetrating.... [P]ossesses that great virtue of having successfully navigated a maelstrom of eddies and crosscurrents in an exciting and emerging subfield within British literary modernism." --Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History