Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present

As England withdrew from its empire after World War II, how did writers living outside the United Kingdom respond to the history of colonialism and the aesthetics of modernism within a global context? In fourteen original essays, edited by Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, a distinguished group of scholars considers these questions in relation to novelists, playwrights, and poets living in English-speaking countries around the world. Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism not only examines how modernism and postcolonialism evolved over several generations, but also situates the writers analyzed in terms of canonical realignments inspired by the New Modernist Studies and an array of emerging methodologies and approaches.

While this volume highlights social and political questions connected with the end of empire, it also considers the aesthetics of postcolonialism, detailing how writers drew upon, responded to and, sometimes reacted against, the formal innovations of modernism. Many of the essays consider the influence modernist artists and movements exercised on postcolonial writers, from W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf to Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstractionism. Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism is organized around six geographic locales and includes essays on Africa (Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee), Asia (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy), the Caribbean (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul), Ireland (Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney), Australia/New Zealand (David Malouf, Keri Hulme) and Canada (Michael Ondaatje). Examining how Anglophone writers engaged with the literary, intellectual, and cultural heritage of modernism, this volume offers a vital and distinctive intervention in ongoing discussions of modern and contemporary literature.

Richard Begam is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (1996).

Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (Oxford UP, 1995).

Notes on Contributors
Introduction Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses

Part I: Africa
Chapter 1: Modernism in Chinua Achebe's African Tetralogy Brian May
Chapter 2: Reading Ngugi Reading Conrad: Modernism, Postcolonialism and the Language Question
Mark Wollaeger
Chapter 3: Kafka and Coetzee Simon During
Chapter 4: Locating Gordimer: Modernism, Postcolonialism, Realism Rita Barnard

Part II: Asia
Chapter 5: Rushdie and the Art of Modernism Richard Begam
Chapter 6: Make It New: Trauma and the Postcolonial Modern in The God of Small Things
Deepika Bahri

Part III: The Caribbean
Chapter 7: (The knocking) has never stopped: Jean Rhys's (Post)colonial Modernism Andrzej Gasiorek
Chapter 8: Walcott, Woolf and Joyce: the Risks of Postcolonial Modernism Genevieve Abravanel
Chapter 9: Worlds Lost and Founded: V. S. Naipaul as Belated Modernist Michael Valdez Moses

Part IV: Ireland
Chapter 10: Samuel Beckett and the Colonial Gag Nico Israel
Chapter 11: Slow Erosions: Seamus Heaney and the Aftermath of Modernism Nicholas Allen

Part V: Australia/New Zealand
Chapter 12: Interior History, Tempered Selves: David Malouf, Modernism and Imaginative Possession
Brigid Rooney
Chapter 13: Modernism and Maoritagna: Re-Reading the Cultural Politics of Modernist Appropriation in the bone people
Philip Steer

Part VI: Canada
Chapter 14: Michael Ondaatje Tricks the Eye Alice Brittan