Description
Book SynopsisRace has long been recognized as a formative element of American modernism, but its role in England is less clearly understood. While critics have examined race in the works of British writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Forster, they have done so...
Trade ReviewCharting a history of racial theories from monogenism to polygenism, evolution, eugenics, and degeneration, Seshagiri shows how the underlying concern of racial discourses is chiefly that of continuity and heredity versus discontinuity and indeterminacy. Race and the Modernist Imagination is a vital and necessary contribution to literary and visual studies of British modernism. Its readings of a wide swath of canonical and noncanonical literature are, on the whole, incisive, remedying the fatal blind spot of race in the making of British modernism.
* MLQ *
Seshagiri's book establishes that the modemist Anglo-British imagination is indeed a racial imagination. Not simply scanning for racism or racial blind spots, she instead reveals the myriad ways that these writers carve out abundant textual space for multiple negotiations of racial difference even as they simultaneously, and problematically, render the terms of art inseparable from the terms of race. She thus sharpens our ability to see how these modemists negotiated their ways through the charged racial fields of the early twentieth century and, with varying effects and uncertain intentions, made art within that field. Timed perfectly to crown a decade of more limited studies of race in British modemism. Race and the Modernist Imagination meanwhile confirms the need to retain race as a key term in ongoing studies of class, sexuality, empire, and transnationalism in modemism.
-- Laura Doyle * Woolf Studies Review *
