Beginning in the late 1920s, MGM usurped Paramount’s position as the most profitable and prestigious studio, largely as a result of the oversight of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg helped develop the corporate personality of MGM – the MGM “Idea” – comprising a glamorous and slick house style, the prioritization of stars, and a system of scriptwriting that involved assigning multiple writers to work on the same project yet often unbeknownst to each other. It is in response to this last phenomenon that authors of very disparate sensibilities – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon [1941]), Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939]), and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) – crafted narratives in a form I call “MGM Modernism”: an aestheticized and self-conscious naturalism developed in part from contact with and subordination to a corporate author.

The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers that included two of the foremost geneticists of the time, J. B. S Haldane and Julian Huxley; the novelist who gave the world the most influential vision of a genetic future, Aldous Huxley; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook rivals Brave New World in its prophecies about the social transformations that genetics might unleash. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the modern world, with its dispassionate, impartial, and unsparing satire of all aspects of life, is closer to the scientific point of view of Haldane and other modern geneticists than to Huxley’s literary modernist peers. The failure to understand Huxley’s satiric vision has led to egregious misreadings of Brave New World to support attacks on twenty-first-century genetics and has distorted public policy recommendations by influential conservative voices.

Pacifist activism flourished in Britain and America during the first half of the twentieth century, and peace was a central preoccupation for writers and intellectuals before and during both world wars. Vera Brittain, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, and Aldous Huxley were all actively engaged in some form of peace writing. This chapter examines this history in the British context, from the impact of conscription during the First World War to the grave challenges to peace of the 1930s. It investigates a variety of texts by conscientious objectors, peace campaigners, feminist pacifists, anti-war poets, public intellectuals, and internationalist reformers. This literary and political history reveals how the notion of peace shifted radically during this period. What began as a moral imperative – inherited from Christian teachings and the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment – was transformed into a secular notion with extensive political potential. As this chapter shows, pacifist thought underpinned arguments towards socio-political reform, and it shaped the language of rights central to political discourse after the Second World War.

Weber’s thesis of the disenchantment of the world is interpreted as “we-prison” in Dialogical Self Theory (DST). As a counter-example, the phenomenon of awe is presented as an experience that opens the self to the wider universe. In that context, Martin Buber’s work on spirituality and Rollo May’s work on creativity are compared. The shadow sides of mystical experiences are outlined and compared with psychotic states of the mind. The work of Aldous Huxley who described the workings of mescaline as a facilitator of mystical insight is presented. Mystical experiences change the so-called “minimal self” on a more basic sensorial level, and they differ from the narrating and the positioning self. Furthermore, Donald Crosby’s “perspectivism” is incorporated in DST under the heading of “positionalism.” As a practical implication, specific guidelines are presented in order to open the self to the experience of awe as a first step to the “depositioning” of the self.

Chapter 6, “Reproduction and Dystopia,” sets out to show that Aldous Huxley’s well-known satire of a reproductive future in Brave New World – humans engineered in bottles, sorted into different classes – is only a small part of his complex moral attitude toward procreation. Novels like Point Counter Point and Island make clear that it was not only cold reproductive technologies that worried Huxley: he considered any creation of new persons to be an ethical quandary. He was prescient in his concern about the environmental degradation brought on by overpopulation – in 1928 he was already warning of humanity’s “tropism toward fossilized carrion.” Huxley’s work betrays a deep melancholy about the peopling of the earth. In this respect he is a kind of prophet for a dystopian tradition that is still with us. This chapter, in its second half, turns from Huxley to his heirs – contemporary novelists like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq – whose glittering dystopian fantasies cannot conceal a more ordinary despair about the perpetuation of human life.

This chapter argues that we should take seriously Orwell’s claim, in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’, that ‘what I  have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art’. By examining how this ambition of yoking art to politics plays out in Orwell’s final novel, it places Nineteen Eighty-Four within the context of the literary problems and practices of Orwell’s precursors and contemporaries. First, it considers his relationship with literary modernism and its legacies, with particular reference to his analysis of the work of James Joyce and Henry Miller, for instance in the 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’. Next, it examines Nineteen Eighty-Four in the light of earlier dystopian and speculative fiction by William Morris, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Jack London, Katharine Burdekin, Storm Jameson, and others; it also considers the influence on Orwell of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Finally, it assesses depictions of writing and the politics of language within the novel, and how their treatment might relate to Orwell’s sense of his place within twentieth-century literature.

This chapter examines noise in literature. Rather than attempt to trace the myriad ways in which ‘noise’ has entered into literary works, the chapter deals with literature’s relationship to what Aldous Huxley described as the ‘age of noise’, the particular acoustic conditions produced by the modern mechanical environments and media forms of the early twentieth century. The ‘age of noise’ was acoustic – produced by factories, cars, gramophones and wireless sets – but it was also a widely circulating social discourse used to make sense of, and argue about, the perils and possibilities of the modern age. The chapter argues that writers played a central role in narrating the ‘age of noise.’ Writers who were concerned with noise in the early twentieth century, such as Georges Duhamel, not only translated the sounds of modern societies into language but also shaped the social politics of noise, playing an important part in defining what, and who, was labelled as noisy.