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

ยท Faber & Faber
4.0
2 reviews
Ebook
256
Pages

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

4.0
2 reviews

About the author

John Carey is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University. His books include studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, The Intellectuals and the Masses, What Good Are the Arts?and a life of William Golding. He is also the editor of The Faber Book of Reportage, The Faber Book of Science and The Faber Book of Utopias.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.