A Shrinking Island : Modernism and National Culture in England.

By: Esty, JedMaterial type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2003Copyright date: ©2004Description: 1 online resource (298 pages)Content type: text Media type: computer Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9781400825745Subject(s): English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism | Imperialism in literature | Literature and anthropology -- England -- History -- 20th century | Literature and society -- England -- History -- 20th century | Modernism (Literature) -- England | Nationalism in literature | Postcolonialism in literatureGenre/Form: Electronic books.Additional physical formats: Print version:: A Shrinking Island : Modernism and National Culture in EnglandDDC classification: 820.9 LOC classification: PR478.M6E85 2004Online resources: Click to View
Contents:
CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION: Late Modernism and the Anthropological Turn -- ONE: Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England -- The Other Side of the Hedge -- "A Planet Full of Scraps" -- Englishness as/vs. Modernity -- Autoethnography and the Romance of Retrenchment -- Modernist Valedictions circa 1940 -- TWO: Insular Rites: Virginia Woolf and the Late Modernist Pageant-Play -- Amnesia in Fancy Dress: Pageants for a New Century -- "A Little Nucleus of Eternity": J. C. Powys's A Glastonbury Romance -- Rebuilding the Ruined House: T. S. Eliot's The Rock -- "Innocent Island": E. M. Forster's Passage to England -- Island Stories and Modernist Ends in Between the Acts -- THREE: Insular Time: T. S. Eliot and Modernism's English End -- The Antidiasporic Imagination -- Metropolitan Standard Time -- Anglocentric Revivals -- Notes from a Shrinking Island -- Four Quartets and the Chronotope of Englishness -- FOUR: Becoming Minor -- The Keynesian National Object: Late Modernism and The General Theory -- Local Color: English Cultural Studies as Home Anthropology -- Ethnography in Reverse: (Post)colonial Writers in Fifties England -- Conclusion: Minority Culture and Minor Culture -- NOTES -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.
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 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.
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CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION: Late Modernism and the Anthropological Turn -- ONE: Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England -- The Other Side of the Hedge -- "A Planet Full of Scraps" -- Englishness as/vs. Modernity -- Autoethnography and the Romance of Retrenchment -- Modernist Valedictions circa 1940 -- TWO: Insular Rites: Virginia Woolf and the Late Modernist Pageant-Play -- Amnesia in Fancy Dress: Pageants for a New Century -- "A Little Nucleus of Eternity": J. C. Powys's A Glastonbury Romance -- Rebuilding the Ruined House: T. S. Eliot's The Rock -- "Innocent Island": E. M. Forster's Passage to England -- Island Stories and Modernist Ends in Between the Acts -- THREE: Insular Time: T. S. Eliot and Modernism's English End -- The Antidiasporic Imagination -- Metropolitan Standard Time -- Anglocentric Revivals -- Notes from a Shrinking Island -- Four Quartets and the Chronotope of Englishness -- FOUR: Becoming Minor -- The Keynesian National Object: Late Modernism and The General Theory -- Local Color: English Cultural Studies as Home Anthropology -- Ethnography in Reverse: (Post)colonial Writers in Fifties England -- Conclusion: Minority Culture and Minor Culture -- NOTES -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

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.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.

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