The intellectuals and the masses : pride & prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939
Publication Information
Chicago : Academy Chicago, 2002.
Physical Description
246 pages ; 22 cm
Summary
Professor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the 'masses' as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler. Carey's assault on the founders of modern culture caused consternation throughout the artistic and academic establishments when it was first published in 1992.
Notes
Originally published: London : Faber and Faber, ©1992.
Contents
- pt. I. Themes
- The Revolt of the Masses
- Rewriting the Masses
- The Suburbs and the Clerks
- Natural Aristocrats
- pt. II. Case Studies
- George Gissing and the Ineducable Masses
- H.G. Wells Getting Rid of People
- H.G. Wells Against H.G. Wells
- Narrowing the Abyss: Arnold Bennett
- Wyndham Lewis and Hitler
- Wyndham Lewis and the Feminization of the West
- Adolf Hitler's Intellectual Programme.
Subjects
- English literature > 20th century > History and criticism > Theory, etc.
- English literature > 19th century > History and criticism > Theory, etc.
- Criticism > Great Britain > History > 20th century.
- Criticism > Great Britain > History > 19th century.
- Canon (Literature)
- Intellectual life.
- Great Britain > Intellectual life > 20th century.
- Great Britain > Intellectual life > 19th century.