The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939
ISBN-10
0571265103
ISBN-13
9780571265107
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
256
Language
English
Published
2012-12-20
Publisher
Faber & Faber
Author
John Carey

Description

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.

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