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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.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
Jed Esty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and Natural Culture in England and a coeditor of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.
Summary
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.
Additional text
The power of Esty's text to rewire one's thinking is most evident in the fact that such quibbles arise only once one has accepted his ambitious reframing of the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century novelistic tradition. ... This is a major rereading of the modernist novel. Its analysis will be unavoidable for future critics of the period.
