Offers a bold new argument about how Irish, American and Caribbean modernisms helped remake the twentieth-century world literary system.

This is the first book to explore the fascinating relationship between literary Modernism and Empire. The book seeks to begin the task of exploring, in a sustained way, the relations between the artistic movement and colonialism. The essays range over subjects and figures such as Ireland, Africa, Joyce, Pound, Townsend Warner, Lawrence and Forster, Kipling, Woolf, and Jean Rhys.

This book provides a re-reading of canonical modernism, connecting it to imperialism without conflating it with imperialist practices.

Everyday life in the far outposts of empire can be static, empty of the excitement of progress. A pervading sense of banality and boredom are, therefore, common elements of the daily experience for people living on the colonial periphery. Saikat Majumdar suggests that this impoverished affective experience of colonial modernity significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. Prose of the World explores the global life of this narrative aesthetic, from late-colonial modernism to the present day, focusing on a writer each from Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Ranging from James Joyce's deflated epiphanies to Amit Chaudhuri's disavowal of the grand spectacle of postcolonial national allegories, Majumdar foregrounds the banal as a key instinct of modern and contemporary fiction—one that nevertheless remains submerged because of its antithetical relation to literature's intuitive function to engage or excite. Majumdar asks us to rethink the assumption that banality merely indicates an aesthetic failure. If narrative is traditionally enabled by the tremor, velocity, and excitement of the event, the historical and affective lack implied by the banal produces a narrative force that is radically new precisely because it suspends the conventional impulses of narration.

In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire's food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature "modernist," a term used as literary scholars understand it--stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with--and to resist--the new "modernist ecologies" of the twentieth century. Deeply informed by Martell's extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce. In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of "defamiliarizing" the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.

Modernism is a key era in literary studies in which the reading and writing of literature was transformed. The Modernist movement smashed the boundaries of what was perceived as ' literary', with writers abandoning traditional conventions and drawing on a variety of very different influences from art to politics. Modernism is difficult to understand without an awareness of contemporary concerns, and Alan Friedman and Mia Carter offer a comprehensive guide to Modernism:An extensive introduction outlining the history and debates ...