British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965 calls attention to the shifting grounds of cultural expression by highlighting Hollywood as a site that unsettled definitions and narratives of colonialism and national identity for prominent British novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and J.B. Priestley.1. Movies and the Lure of Hollywood 2. Hollywood Architecture and the Technicolor Landscape 3. Forest Lawn, Hollywood, and the American Way of Dying 4. Movie Stars and Celebrity 5. British Hollywood Fiction
Well written and thoroughly researched - Anthony Powell Society Newsletter
Lisa Colletta has written a lively and engaging study of British and European writers who came to Hollywood in an effort to escape what they saw as a society exhausted by the burden of history, and later fleeing fascism and hoping to create a new artistic and literary home. This book creates a powerful portrait of expatriate writers Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh as they grapple with the contrast between the shallow and commodified culture of Hollywood and the complex and tragic past in which British and European writers were embedded. - Wendy Martin, Professor of American Literature and American Studies, Claremont Graduate University, USA and editor of Best of Times, Worst of Times: Contemporary American Short Stories from the New Gilded Age
They would say it was the 'quality of the light,' but surely it was easy money that drew British writers to Hollywood. Few liked it. Most left with big egos and bigger bank accounts. Lisa Colletta has given us a fresh take on a place that everyone thinks they know from a point of view that is not-too-foreign. English literary lions usually criticized Southern California (and the US) less as a friend would and more like an eccentric old auntie. - James J. Berg, editor of Isherwood on Writing
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