Description
Book SynopsisA comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England. It tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. It explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form - and on the very meaning of Englishness.
Trade Review"A vital, useful and impressive rereading of the aesthetics and politics of late modernism."--Royce Mahawatte, Times Literary Supplement "Esty's argument ... [is] profoundly stimulating, and is perhaps most convincing when he turns his attention (however briefly) to the writers who followed modernism... [I]t definitely compels us to revise common assumptions about English literature of the last century."--Raphael Ingelbien, Belgian Journal of English Languages and Literature
Table of ContentsACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION Late Modernism and the Anthropological Turn 1 ONE Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England 23 The Other Side of the Hedge 23 "A Planet Full of Scraps" 28 Englishness as/vs.Modernity 31 Autoethnography and the Romance of Retrenchment 36 Modernist Valedictions circa 1940 46 TWO Insular Rites: Virginia Woolf and the Late Modernist Pageant-Play 54 Amnesia in Fancy Dress: Pageants for a New Century 56 "A Little Nucleus of Eternity ": J. C. Powys's A Glastonbury Romance 62 Rebuilding the Ruined House: T. S. Eliot's The Rock 70 "Innocent Island ": E.M. Forster's Passage to England 76 Island Stories and Modernist Ends in Between the Acts 85 THREE Insular Time: T.S. Eliot and Modernism's English End 108 The Antidiasporic Imagination 108 Metropolitan Standard Time 112 Anglocentric Revivals 117 Notes from a Shrinking Island 127 Four Quartets and the Chronotope of Englishness 135 FOUR Becoming Minor 163 The Keynesian National Object: Late Modernism and The General Theory 166 Local Color: English Cultural Studies as Home Anthropology 182 Ethnography in Reverse:(Post)colonial Writers in Fifties England 198 Conclusion: Minority Culture and Minor Culture 215 NOTES 227 INDEX 277
