Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development by Jed Esty (review)

Unseasonable Youth studies the ways in which novelistic subject formation changed, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, as complementary allegories of nation-building and self-making that underlie the Goethean bildungsroman break down. Jed Esty focuses on a pathology many have identified in modernist narrative: arrested adolescence. What he adds to prior descriptions of that pathology is a powerful geographical and historical framework that connects interrupted development to crises in both the European nationstate and its colonial peripheries during the late stages of empire. This framework enables him to demonstrate that many developmental genres—the metropolitan bildungsroman, autobiographical fiction, colonial novels—dramatize a breakdown of subjective temporality whose roots lie in the disrupted temporalities of global capitalism. Writers as diverse as George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen used the trope of stunted youth to cast doubt on Western ideologies of progress, exposing contradictions in overlapping narratives of self, nation, and empire.

Esty shows that in the bildungsroman’s classic period, national-cultural systems mediated between unevenly developed regions—such as city and country—whereas multinational nation-states could not do so during an era of imperial decline. In the hands of Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and other Victorian writers, the bildungsroman aligned nationhood and adulthood to manage narratives of modernization. But coming-of-age narratives from the 1860s onward produced stories of stasis, regression, and hyper-development instead. Among the virtues of Esty’s approach is that it side-steps intentionalist ideology critique, which bogs down in the necessarily complex attitudes writers held toward their embeddedness in empire. Instead, Esty reads formal inconclusiveness as an exposure of the problem of imperial selfhood rather than as a proposed solution to it. Although he acknowledges that writers inflected this problem differently, antidevelopmental form consistently responded to the collapse of universalist discourses of Western Enlightenment, the faltering of historical positivism, the increased political recognition of anti-colonial struggle, and the rise of anthropological concepts of difference.

Esty demonstrates that in “soul-nation” allegories, permanent change and changelessness imply one another, since endless development fails if it cannot be converted into stable forms, individual or collective (4). This proves a highly effective way to understand the immanence of global capitalism in antidevelopmental fiction. As Hannah Arendt and others have noted, the age of capitalist expansion outside of national boundaries put the state structure at variance with permanent economic development. Esty brilliantly demonstrates an economic and political convergence, in which metropolitan novels show individual maturation to be frustrated by uneven modernization (Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss [1860] is a telling instance), whereas protagonists in imperial fiction who cannot develop allegorize whole colonies that fail to modernize.

Through formal analysis, Esty finds fertile, varied ground for his approach. He offers an original, instructive reading of the way in which Schreiner arrests plot in The Story of an African Farm (1883) in order to organize it around the random and cruel trajectories of naturalism. He shows how in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15) James Joyce interrupted plot development in the interest of a fully elaborated theory of aesthetic stasis, which expresses, in part, a colonial intellectual’s suspicion of representative types. In Esty’s account, Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) comments on the fraudulence of colonial opportunity by turning its protagonist into a device for accumulating metaphors. In general, he clarifies the ways in which late Victorian and modernist plots offer an interplay between linear time and falsifications of it through narrative dilation, compression, and acceleration, but he constantly calls our attention to formal variations.

The capaciousness of Esty’s analysis generates striking juxtapositions. Very different fin-de-siècle writers, for example, turn out to have been commonly trapped between a naturalist world of commodified social relations and...