England, Inc.: The corporate reorganization of British modernism, 1918--1956.

摘要

"England, Inc." is concerned with a constellation of British writers and filmmakers who began their lives in early 20th-century Britain and ended them as uneasy employees, ideologues or enemies of multi-national conglomerates. These figures, Wyndham Lewis, Charlie Chaplin, Rebecca West, Alfred Hitchcock and George Orwell, were crucial participants in the transition from British imperial dominance to a decidedly non-British form of corporate hegemony. While still deeply rooted in British structures of feeling, for example, Chaplin and Hitchcock became international icons in Hollywood, West and Lewis became increasingly immersed in corporate subjects after World War I, and Orwell became canonized as a staple of Cold War secondary school syllabi. While sympathetic to works on the "Americanization" of British culture, my work takes a different approach. Specifically, I argue that significant political and aesthetic developments cannot be understood unless the history of English art's role within the corporate age is taken into consideration. An analysis of the transformation of English avant-gardist collectives into bureaucratized corporate teams, I hope, can contribute to the revitalization of traditional studies of American and British national cultures.;Britain and America are too often considered in isolation from one another, and little attention is paid to the corporate mediators that increasingly brought them together. For example, it is obvious that as an employee of British Gaumont in the 1930s, Alfred Hitchcock produced much different films than he did for Universal in the 1950s and 1960s; Orwell was read during the Cold War in a reactionary fashion compared to the way he was in Britain of the 1930s. The effect of corporate institutions on national culture and politics, while of increasingly obvious importance in globalization debates, has yet to be discussed in debates about Anglo-American modernism. "England, Inc." seeks to intervene into this state of affairs by arguing that the political and aesthetic importance of formal transformations of British artists cannot be assessed unless one sees them as symbolic acts made within a newly ascendant corporate system. This system, I argue, gave British culture new and sometimes bewildering functions within the newly dominant "Anglo-American" corporate system.