British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935–1965 : Travelers, Exiles, and Expats

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. Was early Hollywood, with its celluloid dreams and theme-park cemeteries, the beginning of the end of the Western humanist tradition? "British Novelists in Hollywood" 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. Drawn to Los Angeles for a variety of reasons that included everything from easy money, political disaffection, spiritual longing, and the Mediterranean climate, writers such as Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, J.B Priestly, Dodie Smith and Evelyn Waugh, and P.G. Wodehouse represent an incursion of expert settlers representing British culture and civilization. But instead of establishing themselves once again with a mission of colonial superiority, they soon found that their cultural power clashed with the commercially inviolable mass production of American popular culture. Lisa Colletta argues that the British experience in Southern California challenged traditional ideas of national identity and power and implicated them in a complex of choices and influences filtered through the Hollywood dream machine Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-14 Movies and the Lure of Hollywood....Pages 15-43 Hollywood Architecture and the Technicolor Landscape....Pages 45-73 Forest Lawn, Hollywood, and the American Way of Dying....Pages 75-101 Movie Stars and Celebrity....Pages 103-138 British Hollywood Fiction....Pages 139-170 Back Matter....Pages 171-201