Modernism, Empire, World Literature

Description

After World War I, American, Irish and then Caribbean writers boldly remade the world literary system long dominated by Paris and London. Responding to literary renaissances and social upheavals in their own countries and to the decline of war-devastated Europe, émigré and domestic-based writers produced dazzling new works that challenged London's or Paris's authority to fix and determine literary value. In so doing, they propounded new conceptions of aesthetic accomplishment that were later codified as 'modernism'. However, after World War II, an assertive American literary establishment repurposed literary modernism to boost the cultural prestige of the United States in the Cold War and to contest Soviet conceptions of 'world literature'. Here, in accomplished readings of major works and essays by Henry James, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill and Derek Walcott, Joe Cleary situates Anglophone modernism in terms of the rise and fall of European and American empires, changing world literary systems, and disputed histories of 'world literature'. dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781108698146 01.0_pp_i_ii_Modernism_Empire_World_Literature 02.0_pp_iii_iii_Modernism_Empire_World_Literature 03.0_pp_iv_iv_Copyright_page 04.0_pp_v_vi_Dedication 05.0_pp_vii_vii_Contents 06.0_pp_viii_x_Acknowledgements 07.0_pp_1_48_A_Language_That_Was_English_Peripheral_Modernisms_and_the_Remaking_of_the_Republic_of_Letters_in_the 08.0_pp_49_102_It_Uccedes_Lundun_Logics_of_Literary_Decline_and_Renaissance_from_Tocqueville_and_Arnold_to_Yeats_an 09.0_pp_103_151_The_Insolence_of_Empire_The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Europe_and_Emerging_American_Ascendancy_in_The_Gold 10.0_pp_152_195_Contesting_Wills_National_Mimetic_Rivalries_World_War_and_World_Literature_in_Ulysses 11.0_pp_196_242_That_Huge_Incoherent_Failure_of_a_House_American_Ascendancy_and_American_Epic_in_The_Great_Gatsby_an 12.0_pp_243_275_A_Wreath_of_Flies_Omeros_Epic_Achievement_and_Impasse_in_the_Program_Era 13.0_pp_276_307_Notes 14.0_pp_308_318_Index