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
Jed Esty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and Natural Culture in England and a coeditor of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.
"The power of Esty's text to rewire one's thinking is most evident
in the fact that such quibbles arise only once one has accepted his
ambitious reframing of the late nineteenth-and early
twentieth-century novelistic tradition. ... This is a major
rereading of the modernist novel. Its analysis will be unavoidable
for future critics of the period.
--Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History
"[Esty's] extensive secondary references, awareness of critical
trends, and what the series editors right call his 'admirable
stylistic panache' are all impressive. Recommended." --CHOICE
"Jed Esty is a fabulous phrase-maker, but his most extraordinary
talent is for pattern recognition. There are breath-taking moments
of such recognition throughout Unseasonable Youth. Esty is forever
uncovering formal patterns that had somehow escaped other observers
and always mark interesting changes in the landscape of his genre
and period. It will be hard if not impossible for future readers to
think of the modernist bildungsroman without also
reflecting on his powerful and original argument." --Bruce Robbins,
author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good
"Unseasonable Youth offers a masterful set of inquiries into the
relations among novel theory, empire, fraying national sovereignty,
and the sublimations of modernism, and the results are riveting:
this is a brilliant, game-changing argument about the literary
wages of uneven development. By forcing an expanded reading of the
'frozen youth' of so many of modernism's protagonists, Esty leads
us through some of the most patient, illuminating, and
theoretically vivid discussions that I've read in years. Brimming
with insights on every page, erudite and supple, Unseasonable Youth
is a joy to read. Jed Esty has produced a major contribution to the
field of
modern literary studies." --Janet Lyon, author of Manifestoes:
Provocations of the Modern
"Powerful in its theoretical engagements, nuanced in its readings
of fiction, Unseasonable Youth transforms our understanding of the
bildungsroman in the modernist era. In a series of elegant
analyses, Esty shows that the progressive developmental narrative
associated with both individual and nation in the nineteenth
century was not discarded by the twentieth but disenchanted,
deformed, and reconfigured in ways that register the "unshapely
time" of
imperialism and global capital. Unseasonable Youth represents a
major intervention in recent debates at the intersection of
modernist and postcolonial studies--a book that others will admire,
draw upon, and
contend with for years to come." --Douglas Mao, author of Fateful
Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and
Literature, 1860-1960
"This ambitious study politicizes the modernist
Bildungsroman...Besides its weighty historicism, this book will
also be enjoyed for its Kermodean interest in the ordering of
time--'the empty chronos that is the dark other of the
bildungsroman itself'--the technique of novel writing--'How does
such a novel, a tale of endless becoming, function as a
narrative?'--and for how, like the meta-Bildungsroman itself, it
gently registers the attractions of the genre it
deconstructs." --Times Literary Supplement
"Undoubtedly an important book for the way in which it provides a
new and rich perspective on the work of several canonical authors,
something that so often eludes other writers. Ultimately, the same
remarkable ability Esty exhibited in A Shrinking Island for
recognising submerged patterns across a wide range of key texts
means that Unseasonable Youth will forever change how we think
aabout the modern Bildungsroman and understand 'the
fiction of development'." --Make Magazine
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