Modernism and Colonialism

"Modernism and Colonialism is a terrific book-timely, intelligent, capacious, and a pleasure to read."-Douglas Mao, coeditor of Bad Modernisms "Modernism and Colonialism will have a real impact on the fields of postcolonial studies and British modernism. It succeeds in treating colonialism as a condition of possibility for a vibrant British-transnational modernism."-Simon During, author of Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic "The subject of this collection-the relation between modernism, understood especially in terms of formal innovation and self-reflexivity, and the historical phenomenon of British colonialism and of resistance to colonialism-is an important and timely one that has received remarkably little attention."-Derek Attridge, author of The Singularity of Literature "The editors are to be commended not only for persuading such an exciting and well-regarded group of scholars to contribute to this collection but also for structuring the collection so wisely. The essays range widely enough among topics of study to underscore the diverse ways in which modernists and modernist texts engaged with colonial questions, but a genuine, seemingly effortless dialogue unfolds among the essays." -- Paige Reynolds * Journal of British Studies *

Richard Begam is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction / Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses 1 Part 1: Victorian Backgrounds 1. Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin de Siecle / Nicholas Daly 19 Part 2: Modern British Literature 2. Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics / Michael Valdez Moses 43 3. Virginia Woolf's Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction / Jed Esty 70 4. War, "Primitivism," and the Future of "the West": Reflections on D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis / Andrzej Agsiorek 91 5. T.S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence / Vincent Sherry 111 6. Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism to Forster's A Passage to India / Brian May 136 7. "A tangle of modernism and barbarity": Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief / Rita Barnard 162 Part 3: Ireland and Scotland 8. Joyce's Trojan Horse: Ulysses and the Aesthetics of Decolonization / Richard Begam 185 9. Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire / Nicholas Allen 209 10. Elizabeth Bowen's Troubled Modernism / Maria DiBattista 226 11. "Upon the thistle they're impaled": Hugh MacDiarmid's Modernist Nationalism / Ian Duncan 246 Part 4: Toward the Postcolonial 12. Postcolonial Modernism? / Declan Kiberd 269 13. Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity / Jahan Ramazani 288 Contributors 315 Index 319