ENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-209-224
Abstract
In recent years, modernist studies have tended to nationalize issues, putting forward specific features of American and British modernist writings. This article treats Anglo-American modernism in terms of ‘the inverted conquest’ (A. Mejias-Lopez) with America ‘wrestling cultural authority from its former European metropolis’. The article starts with the subject of periphery and centre changing places, first in the imagination of American writers and then in reality. In F. M. Ford’s novel The Good Soldier the situation is seen as if the American would absorb the English. An American John Dowell outmatches and ultimately disparages ‘the good soldier’ and a superior Briton Ashburnham. The novel is analyzed as a result of pushing together two ways of writing - English and American (Jamesonian). Louis MacNeice treats the ‘Americanization of poetry’ in Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938). In Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934) Edith Sitwell affirms the triumph of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry over ‘the bareness of the line’ in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, famous for its poetical Englishness. A sort of latent urge to reaffirm Englishness against advancing Americanism is obvious in Virginia Woolf’s essays on American writers.
About the Author
O. Polovinkina
Institute for Philology and History of the Russian State University for the Humanities
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Olga Ivanovna Polovinkina, Doctor of Philology, professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Head of the Department of Comparative Literature
Academic interests include American studies and ‘metaphysical poetry’. Author of the books ‘The Shiny Skies’. Metaphysical Style in American Poetry of the Early 20th Century [‘Probleski nebes’. Metafizicheskiy stil v amerikanskoy poezii pervoy poloviny XX veka] (2005), Metaphysical Style in the History of American Poetry [Metafizicheskiy stil v istorii amerikanskoy poezii] (2011), as well as numerous articles about the works of J. Donne, T. S. Elliot, etc.
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Review
For citations:
Polovinkina O. ENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’. Voprosy literatury. 2018;(1):209-224. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-209-224
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