Brings together a collection of works by eminent scholars in the field of British and Irish literature to challenge the view that the ideology of modernism along with colonialism aided and abetted empire.

Richard Begam is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity.

Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction / Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses 1
Part 1: Victorian Backgrounds
1. Colonialism and Popular Literature at the Fin de Siecle / Nicholas Daly 19
Part 2: Modern British Literature
2. Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics / Michael Valdez Moses 43
3. Virginia Woolf’s Colony and the Adolescence of Modernist Fiction / Jed Esty 70
4. War, “Primitivism,” and the Future of “the West”: Reflections on D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis / Andrzej Agsiorek 91
5. T.S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence / Vincent Sherry 111
6. Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism to Forster’s A Passage to India / Brian May 136
7. “A tangle of modernism and barbarity”: Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief / Rita Barnard 162
Part 3: Ireland and Scotland
8. Joyce’s Trojan Horse: Ulysses and the Aesthetics of Decolonization / Richard Begam 185
9. Yeats, Spengler, and A Vision after Empire / Nicholas Allen 209
10. Elizabeth Bowen’s Troubled Modernism / Maria DiBattista 226
11. “Upon the thistle they’re impaled”: Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernist Nationalism / Ian Duncan 246
Part 4: Toward the Postcolonial
12. Postcolonial Modernism? / Declan Kiberd 269
13. Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity / Jahan Ramazani 288
Contributors 315
Index 319