Modernism and Colonialism

by Begam, Richard; Moses, Michael Valdez

• ISBN13: 9780822340386
• ISBN10: 0822340380
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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 Gasiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Victorian Backgrounds
Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin de Siecle	p. 19
Modern British Literature
Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics	p. 43
Virginia Woolf's Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction	p. 70
War, "Primitivism," and the Future of "the West": Reflections on D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis	p. 91
T. S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence	p. 111
Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism in Forster's A Passage to India	p. 136
"A tangle of modernism and barbarity": Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief	p. 162
Ireland and Scotland
Joyce's Trojan Horse: Ulysses and the Aesthetics of Decolonization	p. 185
Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire	p. 209
Elizabeth Bowen's Troubled Modernism	p. 226
"Upon the thistle they're impaled": Hugh MacDiarmid's Modernist Nationalism	p. 246
Toward the Postcolonial
Postcolonial Modernism?	p. 269
Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity	p. 288
Contributors	p. 315
Index	p. 319
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