Commonwealth of letters : British literary culture and the emergence of postcolonial aesthetics
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Bibliographic Information
Commonwealth of letters : British literary culture and the emergence of postcolonial aesthetics
（Modernist literature & culture / Kevin J.H. Dettmar & Masrk Wollaeger, series editors, 20）
Oxford University Press, c2013
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Commonwealth of Letters complicates the traditional understanding of the relationship between elite, aging modernists like T.S. Eliot and the generation of colonial poets and novelists from Africa and the Caribbean- Kamau Brathwaite, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, and others-who rose to prominence after World War Two. Rather than a mostly one-sided relationship of exploitation, Kalliney emphasizes how both groups depended on-and thrived off-one another. The
modernists, dispirited by the turn to a kind of bland, welfare-state realism in literature and the rise of commercial mass culture, sought rejuvenation and kindred spirits amongst a group of emigre writers from the Caribbean and Africa who had been educated in the literary curriculum exported to the
colonies in the years before 1945. For their part, the postcolonial writers, ambitious for literary success and already skeptical of the trend toward corruption and philistinism among their compatriot anticolonial politicians, sought the access to cultural capital and the comforting embrace of literature provided by metropolitan modernists. As a result, modernist networks became defined by the exchange between metropolitan and colonial writers. In several chapters, Kalliney provides compelling
analyses of colonial writers in postwar cultural institutions, such as the BBC, literary anthologies, and high profile English publishers such as Faber & Faber and Heinemann, developer of the African Writers Series. Throughout, Kalliney acknowledges the elements of cultural imperialism, and
paternalism involved in these relationships; however, he broadens our perspective on postcolonial writers by emphasizing the strategic ways they manipulated these elite modernist networks to advance their own cultural agendas.Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university
English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s?
Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers-including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists.
Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, T.S. Eliot's notion of impersonality could help recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the
colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments and Permissions
- 1. Modernist Networks and Late Colonial Intellectual
- 2. Race and Modernist Anthologies: Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound
- 3. For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o
- 4. Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors
- 5. Developing Fictions: Amos Tutuola at Faber and Faber
- 6. Metropolitan Publisher as Postcolonial Clearinghouse: The African Writers Series
- 7. Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
by "Nielsen BookData"