In this thesis I trace the origins, morphology, and attributes of a particular strain of anti-materialism in the Western literary and cultural imagination of the second half of the twentieth century. With reference to previous work done on this topic I discuss how this anti-materialism rejects materialistic and rationalistic aspects of modernity and emphasises instead the importance of non-material aspects of society such as cultural integrity and cohesion, tradition, and instinct. I demonstrate that this strain relies on what Raymond Williams termed “organic form”, the fallacious belief that human society can and should follow a set of rules which can be objectively deducted from nature and I argue that it should be placed within the context of a long established anti-enlightenment tradition. Through an analysis of such writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, JRR Tolkien, Edward Abbey, James Howard Kunstler, Chuck Palahniuk, Brian Aldiss and others I show how a common feature of this anti-materialism is concern and anxiety over the potentially destabilising or degenerative effects of life in a technologically advanced society where mechanisation, mass production, and scientific advances have brought relative comfort and prosperity to most people in society and hence I refer to this particular strain of anti-materialism as anti-technologism. More specifically, I am interested in this thesis with examining the way in which this reaction allows for a curious confluence and convergence of progressive and reactionary tendencies. I argue that anti-technologism is a distinct and detectable mood in Western literature, and I trace its origins and influences. Without claiming to provide a functionalist analysis, I consider the role of anti-technologism in Western literature which I see as broadly facilitating an exploration and discussion of themes of cultural vitality and cohesion in the increasingly cosmopolitan and technologically advanced societies of the West.

Film produced by Nazi Germany has been a classic that has drawn scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines as well as innumerable cineastes from various cultural backgrounds. The simultaneous rise in the number of players acting as observers and operators in digital games with a WWII theme has drawn recent scholarly attention since it is thought that this pattern is contributing to players' hazy understanding of historical events. In order to close the gap from earlier studies that there is no future perspective for these concepts refined from Nazi films, nor relevance to films in the field of Game Studies, I proposed a new connection between Nazi films and WWII games based on the conceptual relocation of Fascist Aesthetic, Futuristic Utopianism, and Steel-like Romanticism. In this relocation, Fascist Aesthetic has kept its elements from Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films but expanded to the pursuit of death and violence in the Wolfenstein series (WWII FPS games), Futuristic Utopianism in Piel's science fiction trilogy derived from the passion for technology of the Weimar period, his original designs in the Sci-fi trilogy have proved to be an inspiration for WWII games. In Walter Ruttmann's industrial films, steel-like romanticism was portrayed as a romantic sensation from the production of large-scale, intricate weapons by dedicated German workers to achieve the reactionary modernism, but in WWII simulation games, it evolved into a nostalgia for the weapons built by the Reich. As a result of this change, a trustworthy commemoration of the Third Reich is vanishing from visual culture and its grim past has been changed by simulation.