A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England

Joshua Esty

Published by Princeton University Press 2004

A Shrinking Island

Modernism and National Culture in England

Joshua Esty

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400825745

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Contents

About this book

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s.

Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

Author / Editor information

Jed Esty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Reviews

"A brilliant study of the intricate relationship between late modernism and the shaping of English national culture. Without doubt, one of the best books on modernism and imperialism."—Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan

Esty's argument . . . [is] profoundly stimulating, and is perhaps most convincing when he turns his attention (however briefly) to the writers who followed modernism. . . . [I]t definitely compels us to revise common assumptions about English literature of the last century.---Raphael Ingelbien, Belgian Journal of English Languages and Literature

"This is a superb and stunningly mature first book that sustains both a conceptually ambitious thesis and scrupulous, sensitive, and patient attention to matters of literary form."—James Buzard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A vital, useful and impressive rereading of the aesthetics and politics of late modernism.---Royce Mahawatte, Times Literary Supplement

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Late Modernism and the Anthropological Turn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. Insular Rites: Virginia Woolf and the Late Modernist Pageant-Play Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	54
3. Insular Time: T. S. Eliot and Modernism’s English End Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
4. Becoming Minor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277

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