Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016

Aarthi Vadde

Published by Columbia University Press 2016

Chimeras of Form

Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016

Aarthi Vadde

In the series Modernist Latitudes

https://doi.org/10.7312/vadd18024

Overview
Contents

About this book

Aarthi Vadde shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe. She explains how major writers use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire.

Author / Editor information

Aarthi Vadde is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.

Reviews

Leela Gandhi, author of Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship:
Vadde's contribution is her remarkable insight into the 'chimeral' forms of global modernism. These forms don't flaunt triumphal cosmopolitanism in the face of outmoded nationalisms. Rather they foreground the artificial and recycled style of posttraumatic globalization—after the ongoing displacements of the previous century. Such global coexistence is precarious and makeshift, and also more livable.

Gary Wilder, author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World:
Vadde's expansive, sophisticated, and timely analysis unsettles conventional divisions between formalism and postcolonialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, realism and utopianism, and Europe and its others. Through masterful readings, she demonstrates how in form and content Tagore, Joyce, McKay, Lamming, Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith disrupt given understandings of territory, community, unity, and belonging. Vadde persuasively reveals the importance of literary modernism for imagining nonnational forms of sociability, solidarity, and citizenship.

Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism:
With extraordinary subtlety and flair, Aarthi Vadde charts modernist internationalism as a persistent and shifting impulse toward experimentation in fictions that 'stretch the range of the sayable' in their chimeric, even confounding, depictions of the complexities of social life. Her deft readings will transform the way we understand the unexpected routes between modernism and postcolonialism to the point where those terms can no longer be taken as distinct categories tethered to period and geography.

Laura Doyle, author of Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940:
Chimeras of Form contributes richly and originally to the current remapping of modernism within non-eurocentric, international, and postcolonial coordinates across the twentieth century. Vadde eloquently argues that many modernist texts consciously enter the breach between these apparent oppositions. This book is a rare achievement, and one that will prompt new questions and productive debates in the field of modernist studies.

Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres:
Vadde has written a supple, incisive, and richly thoughtful book. In smart and sophisticated readings, she rigorously thinks through modernist and postcolonial fiction's relation to the ingredients it collages, and she brilliantly illuminates such fiction's relation to an increasingly globalized world.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Chimeras of Form Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Autotranslations: Rabindranath Tagore’s Internationalism in Circulation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
2. Alternating Asymmetry: International Solidarity and Self-Deception in James Joyce’s Dubliners and “Cyclops” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
3. Stories Without Plots: The Nomadic Collectivism of Claude McKay and George Lamming Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
4. Archival Legends: National Myth and Transnational Memory in the Works of Michael Ondaatje Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
5. Root Canals: Zadie Smith’s Scales of Injustice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
Epilogue: Migritude —The Re-Mediated Work of Art and Art’s Mediating Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: December 13, 2016
ISBN: 9780231542562