Atlantic modernism: Americanization and English literature in the early twentieth century

This dissertation, "Atlantic Modernism," argues that early twentieth-century English writers and critics found themselves reinventing English culture in reaction to the rise of American political power and mass culture in the wake of World War One. In the course of this dissertation, I consider works by writers as various as Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, Clive Bell, Elizabeth Bowen, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells. While postcolonial studies tends to read narratives of British decline in light of the waning of Empire, my project explores how these imperial anxieties were complicated by what some saw as a transfer of political and cultural hegemony to the United States. Drawing the connection between transatlantic politics and the advent of new forms of mass culture such as jazz, the Hollywood film, and the literary bestseller, I demonstrate that some in England were beginning to view mass culture and working-class culture as American culture, leading to the curious designation of the highbrow as English and the lowbrow as American. I argue that this deluge of mass forms from America altered the meaning of the popular in modern England, transforming it from an older notion of folk culture tied to ethnic, regional, and national identities, into a transnational formation. Indeed, I contend, the increasingly transatlantic character of English culture ironically helped to give rise to newly tenacious ideologies of Englishness. By placing English modernism in a transatlantic frame, I am able to counter the common critical insistence on the internationalism of modernism with a picture of how English modernism's elitism, traditionalism, and nationalism grew out of its reaction to America. In this way, my project brings together two fields of inquiry that have traditionally been treated separately, modern British and American studies. While scholars of this period tend to focus on the expatriate American poets who populated interwar London and Paris, I suggest that the Americanization of England not only created a transatlantic culture of exchange, but more compellingly, helped to produce the ideological fields of high and low culture within which modernist writing emerged.