Adjusting the focus: The modern British novel and the rise of American film

"Adjusting the Focus" argues that Hollywood's growing dominance in the 1920s and 1930s brought a nationalist focus to modern British narrative. England's slow economic recovery following World War I enabled American film companies to flood the British film market, creating a productive double tension in British culture. On the one hand, British filmmakers strove to create a robust film industry that could compete with Hollywood. On the other, British novelists struggled to maintain the novel's central role on the field of art and culture. By focusing on Dorothy Richardson's contribution to the film journal Close Up, the first chapter charts the change in British literary modernism from viewing film as a neutral medium to seeing as it as a vehicle for nationalist ideology. In the following chapters, I read novels by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Aldous Huxley, all of whom crafted modernist narratives that challenged the main film styles of Hollywood and the British film industry, even as they used filmic techniques to do so. Recent scholarship has described inter-war literary production as increasingly preoccupied with the formation of a national identity and national culture. I argue that to a significant degree it was the specific anxieties regarding the global rise of Hollywood, and the direct encounter of novelists with the competing products of the US and UK film industries, that shaped this nationalist agenda within the modern British novel.