Description
Book SynopsisModernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community. Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies AssociationThe waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writersHenry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaulto trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them. Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out o
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction. The Peripheral Sense of an Ending
Chapter One. Henry James and the Perversity of Empire
Chapter Two. James Joyce and the Negative Community
Chapter Three. Doris Lessing and Late Realism
Chapter Four. V. S. Naipaul and the Rhetoric of Enchantment
Epilogue. Time of the Other
Notes
Index
