A Handful of Dust
A Passage to India
A01=Joshua Esty
Aestheticism
Anthony Burgess
Anti-imperialism
Antinomy
Arts and Crafts movement
Author_Joshua Esty
Between the Acts
Category=DSBH
Category=JBCC
Clash of Civilizations
Classicism
Colonialism
Consciousness
Cosmopolitanism
Cultural hegemony
Cultural imperialism
Cultural studies
Culturalism
Culture and Society
Culture of England
D. H. Lawrence
Decolonization
Defamiliarization
E. M. Forster
E. P. Thompson
English poetry
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eric Hobsbawm
Essay
Ethnocentrism
Existentialism
Exoticism
Four Quartets
Fredric Jameson
G. E. Moore
Genre
High modernism
Imperialism
Interest and Money
Irony
J. R. R. Tolkien
Joseph Chamberlain
Keynesian economics
Kobena Mercer
Late modernism
Literary modernism
Literature
Lord Byron
Manichaeism
Modern art
Modernism
Modernist poetry
Modernity
Narrative
Nationalism
Nativism (politics)
Orientalism
Perry Anderson
Poetry
Post-structuralism
Postmodernism
Raymond Williams
Rhetoric
Romanticism
T. S. Eliot
The General Theory of Employment
The Making of the English Working Class
The Two Cultures
The Wretched of the Earth
Utilitarianism
Virginia Woolf
Woolf
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691115498
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2003
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 Island tracks 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.
Jed Esty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
