Modernism and Colonialism

British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939

Autor: Begam, Richard; Moses, Michael; Daly, Nicholas
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822340195
eISBN Pdf: 9780822390312
Lugar de publicación: Durham , Estados Unidos
Año de publicación digital: 2007
Mes: Octubre
Páginas: 338
DDC: 820.9/112
Idioma: Ingles

Descripción

This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized.

Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends; and how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire.

Contributors. Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry

Contents
Acknowledgments
Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses: Introduction
Part One: Victorian Backgrounds
- 1. Nicholas Daly æ Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin de Siècle
Part Two: Modern British Literature
- 2. Michael Valdez Moses: Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics
- 3. Jed Esty: Virginia Woolf ’s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction
- 4. Andrzej Gasiorek: War, ‘‘Primitivism,’’ and the Future of ‘‘the West’’: Reflections on D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis
- 5. Vincent Sherry: T. S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence
- 6. Brian May: Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialismin Forster’s "A Passage to India"
- 7. Rita Barnard: ‘‘A tangle of modernism and barbarity’’: Evelyn Waugh’s "Black Mischief"
Part Three: Ireland and Scotland
- 8. Richard Begam: Joyce’s Trojan Horse: "Ulysses" and the Aesthetics of Decolonization
- 9. Nicholas Allen: Yeats, Spengler, and "A Vision" after Empire
- 10. Maria DiBattista: Elizabeth Bowen’s Troubled Modernism
- 11. Ian Duncan: ‘‘Upon the thistle they’re impaled’’: Hugh Mac Diarmid’s Modernist Nationalism
Part Four: Toward the Postcolonial
- 12. Declan Kiberd: Postcolonial Modernism?
- 13. Jahan Ramazani: Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity
Contributors
Index