Unseasonable youth: modernism, colonialism, and the fiction of development

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. 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 thecontradictions 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-sicle.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 itfixes 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 thesame moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greaterinfluence 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 ofhistorical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in theAge of Empire. ContentsSeries Editors' ForewordChapter one: IntroductionScattered 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-SystemChapter 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 ProvincesChapter threeYouth/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 JimChapter fourSouls of Men under Capitalism: Wilde, Wells, and the Anti-Novel "Unripe Time": Dorian Gray and Metropolitan Youth Commerce and Decay in Tono-BungayChapter fiveTropics of Youth in Woolf and JoyceThe "weight of the world": Woolf's Colonial Adolescence "Elfin Preludes": Joyce's Adolescent ColonyChapter sixVirgins 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 SeptemberChapter seven: ConclusionAlternative Modernity and Autonomous Youth After 1945Works CitedIndex

• ISBN: 978-0-19-985796-8
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 320
• Fecha Publicación: 17/11/2011
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés