British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-1965 Travelers, Exiles, and Expats

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.

Lisa Colletta is Associate Professor of English at the American University of Rome, Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and essay collections, she is the author of Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, editor of Christopher Isherwood's Letters to his Mother, and co-editor of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien.

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