Modernism, Empire, World Literature

Offers a bold new argument about how Irish, American and Caribbean modernisms helped remake the twentieth-century world literary system.

Joe Cleary (Author)

9781108492355, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 June 2021

326 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm, 0.61 kg

'Joe Cleary's rich new reading of anglophone modernism offers a kind of expert guided tour of canonical texts of anglophone modernism …' Christopher GoGwilt, James Joyce Quarterly

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 ?x and determine literary value. In so doing, they propounded new conceptions of aesthetic accomplishment that were later codi?ed 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'.

1. 'A Language That Was English': Peripheral Modernisms and the Remaking of the Republic of Letters in the Age of Empire
2. 'It Uccedes Lundun': Logics of Literary Decline and 'Renaissance' from Tocqueville and Arnold to Yeats and Pound
3. 'The Insolence of Empire': The Fall of the House of Europe and Emerging American Ascendancy in The Golden Bowl and The Waste Land
4. Contesting Wills: Joyce, Yeats, Goethe, Shakespeare and Mimetic Rivalries in Ulysses
5. 'That Huge Incoherent Failure of a House': Antinomies of American Ascendancy in The Great Gatsby and Long Day's Journey into Night
6. 'Cities that open like The World's Classics': Omeros and Epic Impasse in the Neoliberal World Literary System.

Subject Areas: Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: post-colonial literature [DSBH5], Literary theory [DSA]