The Passage of Literature Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya

The Passage of Literature reevaluates twentieth-century literature and culture by studying the interrelation between English, Creole, and Indonesian formations of literary modernism. Each modernist formation is explained through a set of comparative studies of the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Conrad's canonical profile in literary histories of English modernism is placed side by side with Rhys's contested position in postcolonial accounts of Caribbean writing and Pramoedya's prominent role in the history of Indonesian anti-colonial nationalism. The different models of reading at the heart of each writer's fiction lead to a reassessment of transnational modernism. Ultimately, GoGwilt argues that each passage of literature becomes the site of a contest and crossover between competing genealogies of modernism and modernity. Re-examining the linguistic and literary coordinates of Anglophone modernist studies, and combining the insights of Caribbean writers and theorists with recent work in Indonesian studies, the book outlines the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology and resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.

Christopher GoGwilt is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. He is the author of The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire and The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock.