Intelektuálové a masy - Pýcha a předsudky v kruzích literární inteligence 1880-1939 – Carey John (2021)

The study Intellectuals and the Masses critiques the elitist theses of some of the most well-known figures of the British literary scene at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Through quotations from their works or private writings, it documents the anxiety and aversion that social changes associated with the rapid population growth in the 19th century evoked among intellectuals: urbanization and the development of suburban construction linked to the devastation of nature, as well as the widespread increase in literacy and the subsequent rise of mass culture, whose accompanying phenomena included popular journalism, mass tourism, and advertising. The book examines the ways in which modernist and other authors reacted to this cultural 'rebellion of the masses', whether through the exclusivity and artistry of their works, which pushed them out of reach of the 'uneducated' masses, or through socially utopian projects that some of them created in response to the phenomenon of overpopulation and massification, and shows how some of these ideas inadvertently foreshadow the rhetoric of Hitler's book Mein Kampf.