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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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