Open AccessENGLISH MODERNISM AND AMERICAN ‘TOURISTS’
Author(s) -
Olga Polovinkina
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
voprosy literatury
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 0042-8795
DOI - 10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-209-224
Subject(s) - modernism (music) , poetry , americanization , american poetry , english poetry , literature , american literature , conquest , art history , subject (documents) , culture of the united states , art , history , classics , sociology , anthropology , ancient history , library science , computer science
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.