[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 ... Read moreLeavis 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...possesses 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
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