A shrinking island : modernism and national culture in England / Jed Esty.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Esty, Joshua, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Modernism (Literature)--England.

Modernism (Literature).

Literature and anthropology--England--History--20th century.

Literature and anthropology.

Literature and society--England--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

Postcolonialism in literature.

Imperialism in literature.

Nationalism in literature.

England--Intellectual life--20th century.

England.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (298 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 1930's through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950's. 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Late Modernism and the Anthropological Turn

1. Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England

2. Insular Rites: Virginia Woolf and the Late Modernist Pageant-Play

3. Insular Time: T. S. Eliot and Modernism's English End

4. Becoming Minor

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-275) and index.

ISBN:

9786612158841

9781282158849

1282158848

9781400825745

1400825741

OCLC:

436086466