Description
Book SynopsisUnseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-siècle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development - never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel -- takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial develo
Trade ReviewThe power of Esty's text to rewire one's thinking is most evident in the fact that such quibbles arise only once one has accepted his ambitious reframing of the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century novelistic tradition. ... This is a major rereading of the modernist novel. Its analysis will be unavoidable for future critics of the period. * Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Esty's extensive secondary references, awareness of critical trends, and what the series editors right call his 'admirable stylistic panache' are all impressive. Recommended.?CHOICE *
Table of ContentsContents ; Series Editors' Foreword ; Chapter one: Introduction ; Scattered Souls: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity ; After the Novel of Progress ; Kipling's Imperial Time ; Genre, History, and the Trope of Youth ; Modernist Subjectivity and the World-System ; Chapter two ; "National-Historical Time" from Goethe to George Eliot ; Infinite Development vs. National Form ; Nationhood and Adulthood in The Mill on the Floss ; After Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces ; Chapter three ; Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone ; Outpost Without Progress: Schreiner's Story of An African Farm ; "A free and wandering tale": Conrad's Lord Jim ; Chapter four ; Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel ; "Unripe Time": Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth ; Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay ; Chapter five ; Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce ; The "weight of the world": Woolf's Colonial Adolescence ; "Elfin Preludes": Joyce's Adolescent Colony ; Chapter six ; Virgins of Empire: The Antidevelopmental Plot in Rhys and Bowen ; Gender and Colonialism in the Modernist Semi-Periphery ; Endlessly Devolving: Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark ; Querying Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September ; Chapter seven: Conclusion ; Alternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth After 1945 ; Works Cited ; Index
