‘Bastardizing’ National Belonging: Derek Walcott and Joseph Conrad

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
Jacques Berthoud
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-293
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Ford

The contingencies of military decisions and their outcomes have always shaped the course of literary history, determining even the languages in which it has been conducted. But modern literature takes a new bearing on its determinant military contingencies. This paper describes a modern literary scene that self-reflexively attributes to literature the potential to suspend these determining military events, and so to communicate the unactualised possibilities contained in past contingencies, even those that have been violently foreclosed. It is a scene of interested observers, adrift in a boat, who listen for the sounds of a distant naval battle. Having first located this scene's classical antecedents in Aristotle, I then track it through three pivotal and distinctively modern moments of literary self-periodization. In each instance, the scene is differently configured, articulating a specific conjuncture of war, textuality and literary self-definition. It appears in John Dryden as the setting of a modern critical dialogue on theatre, with James Montgomery as a Romantic definition of the poetry of sound in a lecture series on literature, and with Joseph Conrad as the narrative frame of a modernist tale within a tale. But the same scene re-echoes in all three – the scene of literary inscription as one in which, contingently, a war neither did nor did not take place, a battle was and was not fought.


1962 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-295
Author(s):  
Lawrence Graver
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Lorgia García-Peña

Building on the growing body of scholarship on comparative race and ethnicity, this article considers how immigrants of color and their descendants interpret, translate, and deploy politicized ethno-racial terms (Black, Latinx) to confront racism in contemporary Italy. Through the analysis of cultural texts, including interviews, speeches, and a novel, I argue that terms, ideologies, and racial processes have become both local and global as immigrants and new citizens build transnational networks of contestation from which to confront the violence of coloniality and exploitation that led them to migrate while asserting belonging in the nations in which they reside. 


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