Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development

301 Pages·2012·1.37 MB·English

by  Esty

Unseasonable Youth
Modernist Literature & Culture
Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors
Consuming Traditions Criminal Ingenuity
Elizabeth Outka Ellen Levy
Machine-Age Comedy Modernism’s Mythic Pose
Michael North Carrie J. Preston
Th e Art of Scandal Unseasonable Youth
Sean Latham Jed Esty
Th e Hypothetical Mandarin Pragmatic Modernism
Eric Hayot Lisi Schoenbach
Nations of Nothing but Poetry World Views
Matthew Hart Jon Hegglund
Modernism and Copyright Americanizing Britain
Paul K. Saint-Amour Genevieve Abravanel
Accented America
Joshua L. Miller
Unseasonable
Youth
Modernism, Colonialism, and the
Fiction of Development
Jed Esty
1
3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Esty, Joshua, 1967–
Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fi ction of development / Jed Esty
p. cm.—(Modernist literature & culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–985796–8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. English fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English fi ction—
20th century—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature)—Great
Britain. 4. Bildungsromans, English—History and criticism. 5. Youth in
literature. 6. Adolescence in literature 7. Progress in literature. 8. Colonies in
literature. 9. Imperialism in literature. I. Title.
PR878.M63E77 2012
823’.1009—dc22 2011021174
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For ARG
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Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Introduction: Scattered Souls—Th e Bildungsroman
and Colonial Modernity 1
Aft er the Novel of Progress 1
Kipling’s Imperial Time 7
Genre, History, and the Trope of Youth 14
Modernist Subjectivity and the World-System 25
2. “National-Historical Time” from Goethe to George Eliot 39
Infi nite Development versus National Form 41
Nationhood and Adulthood in Th e Mill on the Floss 53
Aft er Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces 64
3. Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone 71
Outpost without Progress: Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm 74
“A free and wandering tale”: Conrad’s Lord Jim 83
4. Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel 101
“Unripe Time”: Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth 104
An “unassimilable enormity of traffi c”: Commerce and Decay
in Tono-Bungay 115
vii
viii CONTENTS
5. Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce 127
Th e “weight of the world”: Woolf’s Colonial Adolescence 131
“Elfi n Preludes”: Joyce’s Adolescent Colony 142
6. Virgins of Empire: Th e Antidevelopmental Plot in Rhys and Bowen 160
Gender and Colonialism in the Modernist Semi-Periphery 160
Endlessly Devolving: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark 166
Querying Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen’s Th e Last September 179
7. Conclusion: A lternative Modernity and Autonomous
Youth aft er 1945 195
Notes 215
Works Cited 259
Index 275
Foreword
Jed Esty’s topic in Unseasonable Youth is simply stated – the novel of subject
f ormation in the Age of Empire – yet complexly explored. What happens to the
form of the novel, Esty asks, when the reciprocal allegories of nation-building and
self-making that underwrite the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, or novel of
education, no longer seem adequate to the representation of life in an increas-
ingly globalized world? Novels charting the individual’s development from youth
to maturity tended to resolve, or at least to mitigate, the potential contradiction
between the necessity of closure and the potentially endless process of growing
up by positing an ideal of adulthood that was deeply entwined, Esty argues, with
the notion of national destiny. To become an adult was to complete the passage
from innocence – understood as a kind of ungroundedness – into citizenship, or
full integration into the national community. But as the seeming stability of the
nation as form is challenged by the less certain frame of reference produced by
an emerging global system, what seemed the inevitable progress from youthful-
ness to adulthood, from individual to national subject, begins to break down, and
the novel of development starts to fi xate on a pathology that marks the perceived
obsolescence of the nation: the trope of frozen youth, the stunted individual who
cannot or will not grow up. Peter Pan may spring to mind, but think as well of the
dilated adolescence of Dorian Gray, Conrad’s Jim, Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace, and
Stephen Dedalus.
Committed to investigating how literary form mediates historical forces, Esty
identifi es the historical referent for the bildungsroman’s dialectic of youth and
maturity as the historical tension between the dynamic energy of capitalist moder-
nity and the binding power of national identity. Th e argument necessarily, then,
ix