Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development / Jed Esty.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Esty, Joshua, 1967-

Series:

Modernist literature & culture.

Modernist literature & culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

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

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature).

Bildungsromans, English--History and criticism.

Bildungsromans, English.

Youth in literature.

Adolescence in literature.

Progress in literature.

Colonies in literature.

Imperialism in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 p.)

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence. Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values

Contents:

Cover; Contents; Foreword; Acknowledgments; 1. 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; 2. "National-Historical Time" from Goethe to George Eliot; Infinite Development versus National Form; Nationhood and Adulthood in The Mill on the Floss; After Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces; 3. Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone; Outpost without Progress: Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm

"A free and wandering tale": Conrad's Lord Jim4. Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel; "Unripe Time": Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth; An "unassimilable enormity of traffic": Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay; 5. Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce; The "weight of the world": Woolf 's Colonial Adolescence; "Elfin Preludes": Joyce's Adolescent Colony; 6. 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 September7. Conclusion: Alternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth after 1945; Notes; Works Cited; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-19-930723-7

9786613427625

1-283-42762-1

0-19-985797-0

OCLC:

773828506