Thomas S. Davis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231169424
- eISBN:
- 9780231537889
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169424.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In this final chapter, late modernism’s outward turn captures the changes in political belonging wrought by the twin phenomena of decolonization and mass migration from the Caribbean to British ...
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In this final chapter, late modernism’s outward turn captures the changes in political belonging wrought by the twin phenomena of decolonization and mass migration from the Caribbean to British shores.Less
In this final chapter, late modernism’s outward turn captures the changes in political belonging wrought by the twin phenomena of decolonization and mass migration from the Caribbean to British shores.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. ...
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Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both 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 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original 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 antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.Less
Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to the formation of both 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 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original 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 antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, TS Eliot's notion of impersonality could help to recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.
Molly Hoff
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780979606670
- eISBN:
- 9781786945129
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780979606670.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book provides a synopsis and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her close reading, Molly Hoff collects the literary fragments scattered in the novel and gathers them into a ...
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This book provides a synopsis and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her close reading, Molly Hoff collects the literary fragments scattered in the novel and gathers them into a discussion of style, narrative and intertextual references. The author supplements her breakdown of individual lines and words in the novel with her own knowledge of the city of London and the idioms used by its residents, therefore providing a useful context on place and language. Hoff also draws on poetic convention from Classical and modern literature, including Greek myth and Alexandrian poetry, to supplement her discussion of the novel’s use of characterisation, recurring motifs and imagery. Hoff’s annotations are organised according to the novel’s twelve unnumbered ‘section’ breaks, indicated by Woolf with vertical spacing.Less
This book provides a synopsis and analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her close reading, Molly Hoff collects the literary fragments scattered in the novel and gathers them into a discussion of style, narrative and intertextual references. The author supplements her breakdown of individual lines and words in the novel with her own knowledge of the city of London and the idioms used by its residents, therefore providing a useful context on place and language. Hoff also draws on poetic convention from Classical and modern literature, including Greek myth and Alexandrian poetry, to supplement her discussion of the novel’s use of characterisation, recurring motifs and imagery. Hoff’s annotations are organised according to the novel’s twelve unnumbered ‘section’ breaks, indicated by Woolf with vertical spacing.
Gary Schmidgall
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199374410
- eISBN:
- 9780199374434
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199374410.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This introduction establishes just how counterintuitive this project is by setting out Whitman’s aggressively anti-British stance in his pre-Leaves years—his pose of transatlantic antipathy. This ...
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This introduction establishes just how counterintuitive this project is by setting out Whitman’s aggressively anti-British stance in his pre-Leaves years—his pose of transatlantic antipathy. This chapter also situates Whitman within the debate of the 1830s and 1840s over what he called that “terrible query”—can there actually be an American literature? It also presents Whitman’s often flippant early caricature of that “wonderful little island”—England—in his early journalism and Leaves. The chapter ends with a brief assertion of Whitman’s Darwinist notion of literary evolution, to which he would adhere until the end of his life.Less
This introduction establishes just how counterintuitive this project is by setting out Whitman’s aggressively anti-British stance in his pre-Leaves years—his pose of transatlantic antipathy. This chapter also situates Whitman within the debate of the 1830s and 1840s over what he called that “terrible query”—can there actually be an American literature? It also presents Whitman’s often flippant early caricature of that “wonderful little island”—England—in his early journalism and Leaves. The chapter ends with a brief assertion of Whitman’s Darwinist notion of literary evolution, to which he would adhere until the end of his life.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter ...
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Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter argues that the BBC served both imperialist and anti-imperialist agendas at the same time. Although the BBC, through its overseas programming, was designed to maintain a cultural empire of English speakers, Caribbean writers used the organization for their own purposes, allowing them to subtly criticize metropolitan dominance. Additionally, important "Windrush" writers such as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon parlayed their experience at the BBC into concrete professional opportunities in London.Less
Chapter Four examines the BBC's role as a major patron of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s through Caribbean Voices, a weekly literary program. Using extensive archival sources, this chapter argues that the BBC served both imperialist and anti-imperialist agendas at the same time. Although the BBC, through its overseas programming, was designed to maintain a cultural empire of English speakers, Caribbean writers used the organization for their own purposes, allowing them to subtly criticize metropolitan dominance. Additionally, important "Windrush" writers such as George Lamming, VS Naipaul, and Sam Selvon parlayed their experience at the BBC into concrete professional opportunities in London.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, ...
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Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.Less
Chapter Seven examines the evolution of Jean Rhys's long and unusual career. In the 1920s and 30s, Rhys was a typical member of the expatriate artist community of the Left Bank. In the 1940s and 50s, however, she disappeared, staging an improbable comeback in the 1960s, culminating in the release of Wide Sargasso Sea and the republication of her earlier fiction. In those intervening years, however, a number of high-profile Caribbean writers had come to the attention of metropolitan critics and audiences. This chapter situates Rhys's changing depictions of racial difference in this long context, exploring the subtle continuities and equally subtle differences between her interwar fiction and her postcolonial writing.
James D. Lilley
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255153
- eISBN:
- 9780823261062
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255153.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
What are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share?Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced and ...
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What are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share?Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced and were influenced by emerging modern systems of community. Drawing on the work of Washington Irving, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Charles Brockden Brown, the book shows how romance promotes a distinctive aesthetics of belonging-a mode of being in common tied to new qualities of the singular. Each chapter focuses on one of these common things-the stain of race, the “property” of personhood, ruined feelings, the genre of a text, and the event of history-and examines how these peculiar qualities work to sustain the coherence of our modern common places. In the work of Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe, the book further uncovers an important and never more timely alternative aesthetic practice that reimagines community as an open and fugitive process rather than as a collection of common things.Less
What are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share?Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced and were influenced by emerging modern systems of community. Drawing on the work of Washington Irving, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Charles Brockden Brown, the book shows how romance promotes a distinctive aesthetics of belonging-a mode of being in common tied to new qualities of the singular. Each chapter focuses on one of these common things-the stain of race, the “property” of personhood, ruined feelings, the genre of a text, and the event of history-and examines how these peculiar qualities work to sustain the coherence of our modern common places. In the work of Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe, the book further uncovers an important and never more timely alternative aesthetic practice that reimagines community as an open and fugitive process rather than as a collection of common things.
Gill Plain
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748627448
- eISBN:
- 9780748695164
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627448.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after, focusing instead on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers’ immersion in and resistance to ...
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This study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after, focusing instead on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers’ immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters – Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing – the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. This is a decade that does not fit into the canonical story of twentieth-century literature, and this book restores to prominence the innovative work undertaken in areas such as documentary prose, the short story, mainstream theatre and realist fiction. The book also examines the relationship between cinema and literature, exploring the extent to which transitions in narrative form cross the boundaries of media. Detailed case studies of novels, stories, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on a range of writers including Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that ‘peace’ is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-atomic cold war era, this book reclaims the complexity of a decade all too often lost in the fault-lines between pre-war modernism and the emergence of the postmodern.Less
This study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after, focusing instead on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers’ immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters – Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing – the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. This is a decade that does not fit into the canonical story of twentieth-century literature, and this book restores to prominence the innovative work undertaken in areas such as documentary prose, the short story, mainstream theatre and realist fiction. The book also examines the relationship between cinema and literature, exploring the extent to which transitions in narrative form cross the boundaries of media. Detailed case studies of novels, stories, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on a range of writers including Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that ‘peace’ is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-atomic cold war era, this book reclaims the complexity of a decade all too often lost in the fault-lines between pre-war modernism and the emergence of the postmodern.
