Description
Book SynopsisCommonwealth of Letters examines midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism''s leading figures of the 1930s--such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender--come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong''o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney''s original and extensive archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural ant
Trade ReviewIt is the mapping of the literary networks, rivalries, allegiances and collaborations that marks Kalliney's book out as an important contribution in this turn of postcolonial studies to interaction with modernist periodicity and aesthetics ... Kalliney offers a truly expansive study of the importance of migration in the developmental history of modernism. * Robert McLaughlan and Neelam Srivastava, Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *
Commonwealth of Letters is an original and revisionist account of the historical encounter between the writers and institutions of English modernism and late colonial intellectuals, informed by solid archival research and refreshing new readings of the postcolonial canon, and keenly attuned to the complex history of cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. * Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste *
For too long, modernist autonomy and postcolonial politics were thought to be antithetical. This book's splendid research deals this dichotomy a convincing blow. With illuminating insights into crossracial networks in radio, publishing, and other cultural institutions, Kalliney brilliantly shows how modernism enriched African and Caribbean literatures and was itself sustained by them. * Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics *
A fascinating study which explores how modernist ideas influenced a generation of black and white writers-often working sideby-side-and created international networks of affiliation which rise up above race or geography. An illuminating and convincing examination of Anglophone literary history in the second half of the twentieth century. * Caryl Phillips, author of Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11 *
This densely argued study covers a lot of ground, from literary modernism to postcolonial Anglophone literature from the West Indies and Afria. The book's bibloiography testifies to Kalliney's prodigious research." -M.S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton, CHOICE
Kalliney's argument is extensive, meticulously researched, and compellingly revisionist... Kalliney provides a startling and thorough reimagining of the complex lines of aesthetic, philosophic, and institutional affiliation between metropolitan and colonial authors in the period 1930-70. * Novel *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments and Permissions ; 1. Modernist Networks and Late Colonial Intellectual ; 2. Race and Modernist Anthologies: Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound ; 3. For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o ; 4. Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors ; 5. Developing Fictions: Amos Tutuola at Faber and Faber ; 6. Metropolitan Publisher as Postcolonial Clearinghouse: The African Writers Series ; 7. Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual ; Conclusion ; Bibliography
