World Literature

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

Challenging comparative methodologies based on models of literary influence, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey argues that the emergence of modern Turkish literature cannot be understood independently of a discourse of phonocentrism that first matured in the mid-nineteenth century, with the unprecedented intensification of print and translational practices in Ottoman Turkey. While mid-nineteenth century proposals to simplify Ottoman Turkish and to reform its orthography were generally propelled by desire to overcome the diglossia of Ottoman Turkish, the discourse of phonocentrism took an explicitly nationalist turn by the turn of the twentieth century, aiming for the establishment of an impossibly self-same or self-identical Turkish identity. Of particular significance are the Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, which replaced Perso-Arabic lettering with Latin phonetic orthography, and the purging during the 1930s of Arabic and Persian loan words. In readings of literary works by Recâizade Ekrem, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Peyami Safa, and Nâzım Hikmet, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey suggests that the modern literary archive, profoundly self-conscious of its own conditions of possibility, continuously dramatizes and exposes the limits of historically new writing practices. Where Eurocentrist critical discourse idealizes the Turkish language reforms as the culmination of a successful will to rational modernity, the literary texts analyzed in this book offer an alternative critical narrative: one of extreme self-surgery and profound self-alienation. Staging an alternative, non-identarian relation to the Turkish “mother tongue,” these literary works point to the possibility of an open communicability, cognizant of difference.

This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary marketplace, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the 20th century. The book shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the post-colonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) with Tambimuttu (1915–83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.

This book argues that many Anglophone modernist and postcolonial authors have often functioned as geographers manquéés, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative. Reading a diverse body of work by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh alongside writings of geographers and other intellectuals, this book finds a persistent imagining of other orders of geographical and geopolitical space that question or deny the ontological primacy of the territorial nation-state. Many twentieth-century Anglophone writers, the book argues, do far more than dramatize the conflicts of characters and communities within a static frame of geographical and social space; rather, these writers treat geographical space as a primary element of novelistic form. This geographical self-consciousness, or metageography, manifests itself in the novel as a structural tension between two codes of realism: the novelistic, which projects a mimetic space of human characters and invididualize plots, and the cartographic, which understands space as a quantitative, formal abstraction. In negotiating this tension, modernist and postcolonial writers employ a spatial irony as a way to both draw upon the novel's powers of mimetic representation while also critiquing the geopolitical orders of space into which the novel's individual narratives must inevitably fit.