Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern
Regular price
€49.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=C. J. W.-L. Wee
Author_C. J. W.-L. Wee
Category=DSBH
Category=JBCC
Category=JHMC
Category=NHTQ
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780739103890
- Weight: 349g
- Dimensions: 154 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 08 Apr 2003
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern explores the problematic formation of national culture within modern English society. In this ambitious work of post-colonial and cultural theory, C. J. Wan-ling Wee investigates the complex interaction between a modern, industrialized, metropolitan, and progressively rational English national culture and a nationalistic imperial discourse interested in territorial expansion and the valorization of an idealized agrarian past. Starting with the Victorian era, the work documents the complex relationship of concepts such as "home" and "frontier" and "English’ and "colonial" through an analysis of key literary-cultural figures in their historical contexts: Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, T.S. Eliot, and V.S. Naipaul. Wee brings the discussion of modernity into the present with a consideration of post-imperial Singapore—a neo-traditionalist modern society that reworks many of the colonial tropes and contradictions—to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions revealed in the West's engagement with modernity.
C. J. W.-L. Wee teaches literature and cultural theory at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
