World Views Metageographies of Modernist Fiction

The importance of place in the shaping of modernist fiction has received considerable attention in recent years, though scholars have not yet explored the fundamental ways literary reimaginings of the city resisted, rejected, and revised the cultural and political destinies dictated by territorial nationality. World Viewsdoes this work, examining literary representations of spatial form within the contexts of the emerging disciplines of geography, geopolitics, and international relations and positing that modernism's experimental engagements with space intended to imagine alternatives to the new world order. The book's argument is grounded in analysis of two historical circumstances: (1) the widespread perception in the metropolitan West around 1900 that the age of global exploration was coming to an end; and (2) the extraordinary flowering of literature and culture during the same period that meditated upon the nature of geographical space, exploding the terra firmaof nineteenth-century realism. Hegglund explores these twin developments through a series of productive pairings of nonfiction works with modernist and postcolonial fiction. Conrad's little-known essay on imperialism, "Geography and Some Explorers," is conjoined to his indictment of empire in Heart of Darkness. The relationship between the global and the local in Forster's Howard's Endis examined in light of Patrick Geddes's landmark study, Cities in Evolution(1915). The connection of colonial territory and history in Ulysessis buttressed by readings from Michael Helgerson's Internal Colonialism. And the vexed issue of partition is explored using Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Landsand Michael Schaeffer's Warpaths.

Jon Hegglund is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University.
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CONTINENT
Modernism, Geographical Determinism, and the Image of Africa


REGION
Geddes, Forster, and the Situated Eye

Chapter Three
INTERNAL COLONY
The Spectral Cartographies of Ulysses


ISLAND
Rhys, Kincaid, and the Myth of Insular Sovereignty


BOUNDARY
Nehru, Ghosh, and the Enchantment of Lines


Index