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A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England

2004 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS ;ISBN: 9780691115498 ;ISBN: 0691115494 ;ISBN: 9781400825745 ;ISBN: 1400825741 ;ISBN: 0691115486 ;ISBN: 9780691115481 ;EISBN: 9781400825745 ;EISBN: 1400825741 ;DOI: 10.1515/9781400825745 ;OCLC: 436086466 ;LCCallNum: PR478.M6E85 2003

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  • Title:
    A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England
  • Author: Esty, Joshua
  • Subjects: 20TH CENTURY ; Cultural Identity ; ENGLAND ; ENGLISH LITERATURE ; English National Identity ; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh ; European ; HISTORY ; HISTORY AND CRITICISM ; IMPERIALISM IN LITERATURE ; INTELLECTUAL LIFE ; Language & Literature ; LITERARY CRITICISM ; LITERATURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY ; LITERATURE AND SOCIETY ; Modernism ; MODERNISM (LITERATURE) ; NATIONALISM IN LITERATURE ; Postcolonialism ; POSTCOLONIALISM IN LITERATURE ; Twentieth Century
  • Description: 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 Islandtracks 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.
  • Publisher: Princeton: Princeton University Press
  • Creation Date: 2009
  • Format: 304
  • Language: English
  • Identifier: ISBN: 9780691115498
    ISBN: 0691115494
    ISBN: 9781400825745
    ISBN: 1400825741
    ISBN: 0691115486
    ISBN: 9780691115481
    EISBN: 9781400825745
    EISBN: 1400825741
    DOI: 10.1515/9781400825745
    OCLC: 436086466
    LCCallNum: PR478.M6E85 2003
  • Source: Ebook Central Academic Complete
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