Neither completely sympathetic to nor wholly critical of the practices of British imperialism, modernists had a complicated and frequently contradictory relationship to colonialism. This is the premise that drives the collection Modernism and Colonialism, and the remarkably strong essays gathered here provide nuanced readings of modernist texts in tandem with savvy cultural and theoretical analyses to support that reasonable assertion.
Turning away from the common assumption that the nineteenth century was the age of empire, the editors point out that the “boom years” (2) of the British empire coincided with the height of modernism. Thus, the collection focuses primarily on the years 1899–1939, temporal boundaries marked, as the editors note, in literary history by the publication of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the death of Yeats. How, these essays inquire, did European modernists with only limited access to the particularities of colonial experience imagine empire? By asking this question, they seek to revise accounts of modernism and colonialism produced in the wake of Fredric Jameson's influential 1988 essay “Modernism and Imperialism.” Jameson challenged critics to tether the study of modernism—previously coded as largely, if not exclusively, aesthetic—to the politics of empire. However, as the introduction and many of these essays assert, subsequent analyses of modernism and empire have represented European modernists largely as advocates for imperialism and colonialism. In his study of Forster's representations of colonialism, Brian May, for instance, calls out Edward Said and Sara Suleri for dismissing A Passage to India as “an essentially colonialist, even imperialist, text” (136). To correct such totalizing misapprehensions, the contributors focus closely on canonical modernists, including Conrad, Eliot, Joyce, Waugh, Woolf, and Yeats, to demonstrate that these authors were in fact critical of colonialism and its consequences.
The collection is divided into four sections with topics spanning from Victorian popular culture to the reworking of European modernism by contemporary postcolonial poets. In part 1, “Victorian Backgrounds,” Nicholas Daly opens with an insightful and engaging account of modernism, colonialism, and late nineteenth-century popular culture. In doing so, he finds a place for Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard among the modernists who grappled with colonialism. Daly examines the imperial romance, a genre including novels such as Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines, to demonstrate how these authors in their “treasure-hunt novels” (22) likened colonialism to the mass marketing of their books.
In part 2, “Modern British Literature,” Michael Valdez Moses offers an account of Conrad and “disorientation,” in which he identifies feelings including confusion and panic as reactions of the Western mind to imperial settings. By asserting that Conrad refused the impulse to master these chaotic and confusing responses, he argues that Conrad's modernism does not conceal the “grim realities of imperialism” (46) as Jameson suggests. Moses gives commendable attention to form in his studies of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, as does Jed Esty in his reading of Virginia Woolf 's The Voyage Out, in which he demonstrates how Woolf folded uneven, colonial temporality into the novel and consequently reworked the form of the bildungsroman (71). Andrzej Gasiorek looks at war and primitivism in the work of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and Vincent Sherry places the work of Eliot in its late imperial moment to examine how Eliot tinkered with the elegy as the British empire began to disintegrate. May explores modernist modes of colonial representation in Forster's A Passage to India, and Rita Barnard inserts Evelyn Waugh into postcolonial scholarship by examining Black Mischief, his satire of colonialism in 1930s Africa. To expose the limits of the “empire writes back” strategy in reading Waugh, Barnard details her pedagogical tactic of offering Sembene Ousmane's novel God's Bits of Wood as the countertext to Black Mischief; this maneuver not only is effective in supporting her claims about the farcical quality of Waugh's novel but also demonstrates how the issues addressed in this collection can usefully make their way into classroom teaching.
The third section of the collection, “Ireland and Scotland,” examines writers more directly subject to British colonization. Richard Begam takes the middle ground between apolitical and überpolitical Joyce in his account of Ulysses, Nicholas Allen reads Yeats's A Vision in light of the interwar period and the poet's engagement with Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Maria DiBattista examines what happens when modernism moves from the city to the Irish countryside of Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, and Ian Duncan provides in his account of the tensions between Scottish nationalism and modernism a fantastic reading of Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
The fourth and final section, entitled “Toward the Postcolonial,” includes essays by Declan Kiberd and Jahan Ramazani. Kiberd offers a characteristically synthetic account of modernism that employs adept readings and illuminating anecdotes to give fresh insight into Eliot and empire and New Criticism and Joyce. Ramazani demonstrates how post–World War II non-Western poets, such as Lorna Goodison, Kamau Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott, employed European modernism to challenge imperialism. Like the other essays in this collection, these final pieces demonstrate how colonial and postcolonial literatures variantly respond to—that is, how they challenge, rebuke, engage, and celebrate—modernisms deriving from imperial Europe.
The editors are to be commended not only for persuading such an exciting and well-regarded group of scholars to contribute to this collection but also for structuring the collection so wisely. The essays range widely enough among topics of study to underscore the diverse ways in which modernists and modernist texts engaged with colonial questions, but a genuine, seemingly effortless dialogue unfolds among the essays. For example, Esty filters Conrad's representations of colonialism through Woolf, while Barnard examines them through Waugh; Moses and DiBattista both ask us to question the primacy of the urban in modernism. As well, patterns deserving further exploration emerge; provocative observations about Eliot appear throughout the collection, as do nods to the adventure tale. It is common to dip into a collection like this for an essay on a topic of particular interest, but in Modernism and Colonialism there is a real intellectual cost to that strategic tactic—one that might inhibit a reader's encounter with the rich complexity of modernism's critique of colonialism.
