Unseasonable Youth

Jed Esty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England and coeditor, with Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Antoinette Burton, and Matti Bunzl, of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.

covers so much ground ... Beside its weighty historicism, this book will also be enjoyed for its Kermodean interest in the ordering of time ... the technique of novel writing ... and for how, like the meta-Bildungsroman utsekf, it gently registers the attractions of the genre it deconstructs

• Contents ; Series Editors' Foreword ; Chapter one: 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 ; Chapter two ; "National-Historical Time" from Goethe to George Eliot ; Infinite Development vs. National Form ; Nationhood and Adulthood in The Mill on the Floss ; After Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces ; Chapter three ; Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone ; Outpost Without Progress: Schreiner's Story of An African Farm ; "A free and wandering tale": Conrad's Lord Jim ; Chapter four ; Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel ; "Unripe Time": Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth ; Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay ; Chapter five ; Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce ; The "weight of the world": Woolf's Colonial Adolescence ; "Elfin Preludes": Joyce's Adolescent Colony ; Chapter six ; 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 September ; Chapter seven: Conclusion ; Alternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth After 1945 ; Works Cited ; Index