Unseasonable Youth Modernist Literature & Culture Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors Consuming Traditions Criminal Ingenuity Elizabeth Outka Ellen Levy Machine-Age Comedy Modernism’s Mythic Pose Michael North Carrie J. Preston Th e Art of Scandal Unseasonable Youth Sean Latham Jed Esty Th e Hypothetical Mandarin Pragmatic Modernism Eric Hayot Lisi Schoenbach Nations of Nothing but Poetry World Views Matthew Hart Jon Hegglund Modernism and Copyright Americanizing Britain Paul K. Saint-Amour Genevieve Abravanel Accented America Joshua L. Miller Unseasonable Youth Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development Jed Esty 1 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Esty, Joshua, 1967– Unseasonable youth : modernism, colonialism, and the fi ction of development / Jed Esty p. cm.—(Modernist literature & culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–985796–8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English fi ction— 20th century—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 4. Bildungsromans, English—History and criticism. 5. Youth in literature. 6. Adolescence in literature 7. Progress in literature. 8. Colonies in literature. 9. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. PR878.M63E77 2012 823’.1009—dc22 2011021174 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For ARG This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii 1. Introduction: Scattered Souls—Th e Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity 1 Aft er the Novel of Progress 1 Kipling’s Imperial Time 7 Genre, History, and the Trope of Youth 14 Modernist Subjectivity and the World-System 25 2. “National-Historical Time” from Goethe to George Eliot 39 Infi nite Development versus National Form 41 Nationhood and Adulthood in Th e Mill on the Floss 53 Aft er Eliot: Aging Forms and Globalized Provinces 64 3. Youth/Death: Schreiner and Conrad in the Contact Zone 71 Outpost without Progress: Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm 74 “A free and wandering tale”: Conrad’s Lord Jim 83 4. Souls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel 101 “Unripe Time”: Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth 104 An “unassimilable enormity of traffi c”: Commerce and Decay in Tono-Bungay 115 vii viii CONTENTS 5. Tropics of Youth in Woolf and Joyce 127 Th e “weight of the world”: Woolf’s Colonial Adolescence 131 “Elfi n Preludes”: Joyce’s Adolescent Colony 142 6. Virgins of Empire: Th e Antidevelopmental Plot in Rhys and Bowen 160 Gender and Colonialism in the Modernist Semi-Periphery 160 Endlessly Devolving: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark 166 Querying Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen’s Th e Last September 179 7. Conclusion: A lternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth aft er 1945 195 Notes 215 Works Cited 259 Index 275 Foreword Jed Esty’s topic in Unseasonable Youth is simply stated – the novel of subject f ormation in the Age of Empire – yet complexly explored. What happens to the form of the novel, Esty asks, when the reciprocal allegories of nation-building and self-making that underwrite the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, or novel of education, no longer seem adequate to the representation of life in an increas- ingly globalized world? Novels charting the individual’s development from youth to maturity tended to resolve, or at least to mitigate, the potential contradiction between the necessity of closure and the potentially endless process of growing up by positing an ideal of adulthood that was deeply entwined, Esty argues, with the notion of national destiny. To become an adult was to complete the passage from innocence – understood as a kind of ungroundedness – into citizenship, or full integration into the national community. But as the seeming stability of the nation as form is challenged by the less certain frame of reference produced by an emerging global system, what seemed the inevitable progress from youthful- ness to adulthood, from individual to national subject, begins to break down, and the novel of development starts to fi xate on a pathology that marks the perceived obsolescence of the nation: the trope of frozen youth, the stunted individual who cannot or will not grow up. Peter Pan may spring to mind, but think as well of the dilated adolescence of Dorian Gray, Conrad’s Jim, Woolf’s Rachel Vinrace, and Stephen Dedalus. Committed to investigating how literary form mediates historical forces, Esty identifi es the historical referent for the bildungsroman’s dialectic of youth and maturity as the historical tension between the dynamic energy of capitalist moder- nity and the binding power of national identity. Th e argument necessarily, then, ix