Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development
(Modernist literature & culture / Kevin J.H. Dettmar & Masrk Wollaeger, series editors)
Oxford University Press, c2012
- : hbk
Available at 15 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Contents of Works
- Introduction. Scattered souls: the bildungsroman and colonial modernity; after the novel of progress; Kipling's imperial time; genre, history, and the trope of youth; modernist subjectivity and the world-system
- "National-historical time" from Goethe to George Eliot
- Youth/death: Schreiner and Conrad in the contact zone
- Souls of men under capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the anti-novel
- Tropics of youth in Woolf and Joyce
- Virgins of empire: the antidevelopmental plot in Rhys and Bowen
- Conclusion: alternative modernity and autonomous youth after 1945
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to
explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the
fin-de-siecle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development - never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel - takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological
discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsroman undergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual
displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.
Table of Contents
- Contents
- Series Editors' Foreword
- Chapter one: Introduction
- Scattered Souls: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity
- After the Novel of Progress
- Kipling's Imperial Time
- Genre, History, and the Trope of Youth
- Modernist Subjectivity and the World-System
- Chapter two
- "National-Historical Time" from Goethe to George Eliot
- Infinite Development vs. National Form
- Nationhood and Adulthood in The Mill on the Floss
- After Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces
- Chapter three
- Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone
- Outpost Without Progress: Schreiner's Story of An African Farm
- "A free and wandering tale": Conrad's Lord Jim
- Chapter four
- Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel
- "Unripe Time": Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth
- Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay
- Chapter five
- Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce
- The "weight of the world": Woolf's Colonial Adolescence
- "Elfin Preludes": Joyce's Adolescent Colony
- Chapter six
- Virgins of Empire: The Antidevelopmental Plot in Rhys and Bowen
- Gender and Colonialism in the Modernist Semi-Periphery
- Endlessly Devolving: Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark
- Querying Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September
- Chapter seven: Conclusion
- Alternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth After 1945
- Works Cited
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"