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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.

This book brings Johnson more sharply into focus by casting him amongst an unfamiliar milieu and company; likewise, it is hoped that by bringing Johnson to bear on the various authors and topics gathered, it manages to foreground some aspects of Modernism and its practitioners that would otherwise remain elusively hidden. If it is unlikely that the phrase “Modernity Johnson” will eclipse such better-known appellations as “Dictionary Johnson” and “the Rambler,” this volume suggests that it urges a rethinking of both Johnson and Modernism in ways that are at once compelling, illuminating, and critically productive.

This book focuses on the considerable but neglected body of works translated by S. S. Koteliansky from 1919–1923 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Close-readings and broad cross-cultural contextualisations point to the influence that translating Russian authors such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky had on the writers individually, as well as to the relevance of these collaborations within the poetics and cultural dynamics of Anglophone modernism. Koteliansky’s collaborative translations with other writers, including Leonard Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, is also evoked. Read as an oeuvre, the co-translations suggest how the practical workings of an exceptional collaborative partnership impacted on Woolf and Mansfield’s creative vision and literary apprenticeship as they experimented with voice, consciousness, gendered language and masks. By also highlighting literary networks, editorial agendas, publishers’ policies and marketing strategies in the post-revolutionary and post-war years, the study contributes to our understanding of the cultural and historical dynamics of literary translation.