Americanizing Britain. The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire

221 Pages·2012·1.895 MB·English

by  Genevieve Abravanel

Americanizing Britain
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions Criminal Ingenuity
Elizabeth Outka Ellen Levy
Machine-Age Comedy Modernism’s Mythic Pose
Michael North Carrie J. Preston
Th e Art of Scandal Pragmatic Modernism
Sean Latham Lisi Schoenbach
Th e Hypothetical Mandarin Unseasonable Youth
Eric Hayot Jed Esty
Nations of Nothing But Poetry World Views
Matthew Hart Jon Hegglund
Modernism & Copyright Americanizing Britain
Paul K. Saint-Amour Genevieve Abravanel
Accented America
Joshua L. Miller
Americanizing
Britain
Th e Rise of Modernism in the Age
of the Entertainment Empire
Genevieve Abravanel
1
3
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ISBN 978-0-19-9754458

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Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Ameritopias: Transatlantic Fictions of England’s Future 24
2. Jazzing Britain: Th e Transatlantic Jazz Invasion and
the Remaking of Englishness 53
3. Th e Entertainment Empire: Britain’s Hollywood between the Wars 85
4. English by Example: F.R. Leavis and the Americanization
of Modern England 110
5. Make It Old: Inventing Englishness in Four Quartets 131
Aft erword 157
Notes 165
Index 197
v
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Series Editors’ Foreword
Th ere are many things we love about editing the Modernist Literature & Culture
series: one of those is nicely represented in Genevieve Abravanel’s Americanizing
Britain: Th e Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire. To wit: it’s
a thrill to encounter the work of new scholars in modernist studies, and to allow
their work to mess with your head.
For us, the central paradox of Americanizing Britain is this: if Abravanel’s claim
is correct—if much about British modernism can be understood only by restoring
the dynamic relationship of British and American to those various other vectors
along which we’ve become used to performing our analyses (high vs. low, art vs.
entertainment, center vs. margin)—then surely we would have known of it before
now. A claim as bold as this is almost certain not to prove out.
But when it does . . . well, it’s a beautiful thing; and for that reason, this is a beautiful
book. In it, Abravanel unravels, with extraordinary patience and clarity, the absolutely
articulate (if largely unconscious) history of twentieth-century British culture’s simul-
taneous invention and demonization of “the American Age.” Th e “Americanizing”
trope from her title is not her coinage, it turns out, but instead fl oated through British
cultural discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century to identify a force
akin to what Matthew Arnold had, a half-century earlier, dubbed “Philistinism.”
“Early twentieth-century British writers, scholars, and commentators,” Abravanel
explains, “had a name for what was happening to England and the world: they called
it ‘Americanisation.’ ” Arnold had spotted it “on the French coast,” whereas Kipling
and Wells and Woolf and Leavis saw it instead across the Atlantic: but both genera-
tions understood themselves as standing on “a darkling plain / Swept with confused
alarms of struggle and fl ight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
vii
viii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
As Abravanel unfolds her tale, Britain’s fear of Americanization is seemingly
everywhere. It’s bound up intimately, if secretly, with its fears of loss of empire,
with “a collapse from Britishness to Englishness, a shift from imperial confi dence
to pride in local customs and national traditions.” And as Britain lost her grip on
her empire, and was poised to shrink from Great Britain to a modest, nostalgically
reduced state of “merrie England,” so she began reactively to identify imperial-
ism in the form of American popular entertainment—what Abravanel calls the
American Entertainment Empire. Hence the oft -voiced fears that “England was
being colonized internally by American cinema” or—even worse—that Britain’s
own colonies were being recolonized by the American “talkies,” putting, as
Abravanel writes, “England in the role of colony to America’s new media empire.”
In another era, such nefarious infl uence might have been troped in terms of viral
infection; during the Cold War, it would likely have manifested in fantasies of zom-
bie takeover. Abravanel quotes from a rather fantastic speech given in the House
of Commons in 1927: “We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all
intents and purposes, are temporary American citizens.” He was talking, of course,
about American movies, but not Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
One of the admirable features of Americanizing Britain is the way that Abravanel
draws from both canonical and noncanonical texts and treats a wide range of writ-
ers, including those conventionally considered “minor,” to illustrate her thesis.
H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling are both put in the dock, and testify as vividly
as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, or the editors of Close Up to the pervasive fear of
Americanization. Wells actually championed a version of Americanization—what
he referred to as “Th e United States of Everywhere”—as an antidote to the retro-
gressive embrace of an ersatz Englishness he saw taking hold. Th is kind of pro-
posal Abravanel reads under the banner of “Ameritopia,” a distinctive thread in the
texts she explores; somewhat surprisingly, she fi nds Woolf, in an essay written for
the American Cosmopolitan magazine, one of its breathless exponents. Breathless
but not guileless: “Woolf can write so cunningly about the United States without
ever needing to visit,” Abravanel points out, “because as she well understands, by
the late thirties Ameritopia exists nowhere so potently as in the British imagina-
tion.” In the discourse of Americanization, we learn, what matters is not so much
the “actual” eff ect of American cultural production on an embattled British way of
life, but instead British perceptions of that impact.
Abravanel’s treatment of the Leavises, especially F. R., is one of the book’s real
treats, as she seeks to understand the response of English criticism to the men-
ace posed by the American Century. What she discovers is that “Leavis’s infl uen-
tial role in the development of English as a discipline follows from his desire to
SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD ix
design a fi eld of study that would save England from Americanization.” She even
suggests—though it’s left at the level of suggestion—that literary studies in the
United States itself imbibed Leavis’s fear of Americanization, a type of literary
self-loathing that must have taken a toll on the shape and trajectory of U. S. lit-
erary study. Most surprising of all—though we’ll leave you to read the details
yourself—Abravanel shows how the British “anti-Leavis,” Richard Hoggart, foun-
der of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, himself replicates Leavis’s anti-
Americanism.
For us, the book’s most surprising argument, and the one most likely to pro-
voke response, is Abravanel’s reading of Four Quartets as a poem of beginnings
and endings that silently elides . . . well, the United States. Th is closing chapter
demonstrates most fully the heuristic power of Abravanel’s critical lens; “In Four
Quartets,” she argues, “Eliot resolves the dilemma between modern Britain and
the United States by refusing them both, returning instead to the moment in colo-
nial history when America was part of Great Britain. In so doing, Four Quartets
produces a specifi cally transatlantic nostalgia that recalls the golden age of British
imperialism through its colonial relationship with America.” It’s a tour de force
reading of a poem that’s been much read—but never quite like this.
When a book articulates a thesis with this kind of analytical power, it seems
almost to generate its own examples and case studies: one puts down the book
still wearing its lenses, and looks at English modernism altogether anew. Th e most
charming example of this comes in the book’s brief Aft erword, and we won’t spoil
that lagniappe further than to say that its deft reading of the novels of J. K. Rowling
absolutely “gets” the Harry Potter phenomenon, while at the same time present-
ing the most convincing argument to date for its curious force. For we Americans
still carry a strong strain of Anglophilia, of course, and that same English cul-
ture, in its twentieth-century variety, is formed around an irritant grain of
anti-Americanism.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar
and
Mark Wollaeger