__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-siècle. 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.

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nexusstc/Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development/13a08d1ce0bc694971a72d61dccb587b.pdf

zlib/Poetry/American Poetry/Esty, Joshua/Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development_2923286.pdf

Joshua Esty

Esty, Jed

Jed Esty

Oxford Institute for Energy Studies

German Historical Institute London

Modernist literature & culture, Modernist literature & culture, New York, New York State, 2012

Modernist literature & culture, New York, 2013

Oxford University Press USA, New York, 2012

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

1, 2011-11-04

1, PS, 2011

lg1680587

{"edition":"1","isbns":["0199857962","9780199857968"],"last_page":304,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","series":"Modernist literature & culture"}

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence. Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth 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 developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. Narratives of world progress run up against stubborn developmental obstacles, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and Freudian sexological theories were lending influence to the idea that some forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing forces. In this context, the modernist bildungsroman can be seen as narrating the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire. Jed Esty follows this fascinating line of argument through analysis of novels by Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Rhys, and others to reveal how 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 re-imagination of colonial space at the fin de siecle. Features : - Reveals how late Victorian and modernist novelists upended and subverted the typical conventions of the rite of passage story - Brings modernist studies into dialogue with the burgeoning subfield of childhood studies through its examination of adolescence - Covers seminal bildungsromans by Goethe, Kipling, Wilde, Joyce, and others ." Publisher's note

"The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence. Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth 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 developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. Narratives of world progress run up against stubborn developmental obstacles, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and Freudian sexological theories were lending influence to the idea that some forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing forces. In this context, the modernist bildungsroman can be seen as narrating the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire. Jed Esty follows this fascinating line of argument through analysis of novels by Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Rhys, and others to reveal how 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 re-imagination of colonial space at the fin de siècle."--Provided by publisher

Cover 1
Contents 8
Foreword 10
Acknowledgments 14
1. Introduction: Scattered Souls—The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity 20
After the Novel of Progress 20
Kipling’ s Imperial Time 26
Genre, History, and the Trope of Youth 33
Modernist Subjectivity and the World-System 44
2. “National-Historical Time” from Goethe to George Eliot 58
Infinite Development versus National Form 60
Nationhood and Adulthood in The Mill on the Floss 72
After Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces 83
3. Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone 90
Outpost without Progress: Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm 93
“A free and wandering tale”: Conrad’s Lord Jim 102
4. Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel 120
“Unripe Time”: Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth 123
An “unassimilable enormity of traffic”: Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay 134
5. Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce 146
The “weight of the world”: Woolf ’s Colonial Adolescence 150
“Elfin Preludes”: Joyce’s Adolescent Colony 161
6. Virgins of Empire: The Antidevelopmental Plot in Rhys and Bowen 179
Gender and Colonialism in the Modernist Semi-Periphery 179
Endlessly Devolving: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark 185
Querying Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September 198
7. Conclusion: Alternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth after 1945 214
Notes 234
Works Cited 278
Index 294
A 294
B 294
C 295
D 296
E 296
F 296
G 296
H 297
I 297
J 297
K 297
L 298
M 298
N 299
O 299
P 299
R 299
S 300
T 300
U 301
V 301
W 301
Y 301
Z 301

Content: 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

Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions by Wilde, Woolf, Conrad, Joyce, Bowen, and others to challenge and expand our understanding of the bildungsroman genre.

2017-04-22