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Product Description
Product 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.
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Whilst I am inclined to agree with some of the criticisms made by other reviewers, they are not major problems when set against the real and important achievements of this book. Yes, Jonathan Rose's 'The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes' is much more thoroughly researched and overall is more rewarding, but it's a bigger book and on a different subject. Indeed, both books should be read together as they show different sides of the coin. They compliment each other well.
Carey's book certainly has its virtues. He isn't afraid to be blunt where it is justified and he has a gently cutting sense of humour when he has a mind. He has performed a signal service with this book, shedding light on the less savoury side of some of our much-vaunted intellectual predecessors. He's not the first to notice some of these things, but he puts his argument together well and the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Pretentious worshippers of the likes of Woolf and Eliot now have no excuse for not knowing that their heroes had moral feet of clay. It doesn't lessen their achievement as artists - I appreciate Eliot's work myself - but it should provide food for thought. Thank heavens, one might say, for 'the death of the author'. Personally, I'm rather glad that their dislike of educating the masses was sensibly ignored. If it hadn't been, I probably wouldn't be writing this.
Carey's book certainly has its virtues. He isn't afraid to be blunt where it is justified and he has a gently cutting sense of humour when he has a mind. He has performed a signal service with this book, shedding light on the less savoury side of some of our much-vaunted intellectual predecessors. He's not the first to notice some of these things, but he puts his argument together well and the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Pretentious worshippers of the likes of Woolf and Eliot now have no excuse for not knowing that their heroes had moral feet of clay. It doesn't lessen their achievement as artists - I appreciate Eliot's work myself - but it should provide food for thought. Thank heavens, one might say, for 'the death of the author'. Personally, I'm rather glad that their dislike of educating the masses was sensibly ignored. If it hadn't been, I probably wouldn't be writing this.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A very well-written book full of fascinating details. A few criticisms: I would have preferred a chronological approach, to show how attitudes had changed over the period covered - this is only approximated by the ordering of material, ending with Hitler and covering postmodernism in the postscript; occasional lapses into subjective language are unworthy of the author; a failure to recognise that Joyce not only wrote about the 'common man' but was happy to associate with him, suggesting that his prolix style was not simply the result of a desire to be 'exclusive' (and to say this is true of others is a bit simplistic). The treatment of Orwell also seemed a bit unfair, and did Nietzsche really have less subtlety and imagination than DH Lawrence? I would agree with the central thesis - that to view 'the masses' as a uniformly subhuman group is an arrogant fallacy. But surely it's valid to be critical of and frustrated by the mass media that pander to the lowest common denominator, even if their audience are, individually, more intelligent than what they read.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is probably politically incorrect but I found this book very funny in parts as it mirrors to some extent contemporary concerns about dumbing down. The shock & outrage (described by John Carey) felt by the intelligentsia at the thought of (for instance) the working class being encouraged to read is funny but also very chilling and echoes many of the ill informed leaders carried by many (so called) newspapers 100 years later. A thought provoking and unsettling read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Has its moments - but lazy and unfair
The first thing that I feel I should mention is that this work, in which John Carey is highly critical of the deliberate obfuscation of modernism, which Carey claims was a strategy... Read more
Published on 7 Aug 2006 by Ms. C. M. Elvey
The 'Intellectual Elites' view YOU the masses with fear & suspicion.
Carey is an excellent author (and speaker) he never gets over heated, pompous or partisan.
This book outlines how the intellectual elite of the 1930s viewed thier fellow man,... Read more
This book outlines how the intellectual elite of the 1930s viewed thier fellow man,... Read more
Published on 27 Feb 2002 by ISCA
A book that gives an answer to the way we are
John Carey has given us an insight to the reason why we are the way we are. Prejudice has always been a part of this country's social fabric and the middle classes are as guilty... Read more
Published on 16 Jun 1999
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