cover image 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

John Carey. St. Martin's Press, $19.95 (246pp) ISBN 978-0-312-09833-9

This scathing critique argues that modernist literature and art arose as a reaction against popular culture and the mass reading public created by late 19th-century educational reforms. Oxford Enlgish professor Carey shows how intellectuals like D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Knut Hamsun, George Gissing and Wyndham Lewis scorned ``the masses'' as vulgar and trivial while exalting the artist as a natural aristocrat and transmitter of timeless values. T. S. Eliot predicted that the spread of education would lead to barbarism. Charles Baudelaire condemned photography as a distraction for the ``vile multitude,'' while other intellectuals expressed contempt for newspapers and popular entertainments. H. G. Wells proposed measures to restrict parenthood as a means to curb the ``black and brown races'' whom he considered inferior to whites. Carey's razor-sharp analysis is an antidote to snobbery and class prejudice in all forms. (Dec.)