Empire's Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form

Introduction. Rerouting Irish Modernism: Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Imperative of Cosmopolitanism

This chapter argues that an overemphasis on cosmopolitanism as the signature feature of modernism significantly distorts understandings of the development of modernist aesthetics, especially in postcolonial contexts. Arguing that Irish writers' late modernism implodes the anthropological object anchoring the primitivism of high modernist thought, the chapter discusses the conceptions of "anthropological modernism" offered by Gregory Castle, Jed Esty, and Marc Manganaro and explains how considerations of Irish late modernism shed new light on the projects of "the new modernist studies" and analyses of "global" modernism. Tracing the different ways that scholars as varied as Richard Ellmann, Terry Eagleton, Robert Crawford, and Rebecca Walkowitz have framed the relationship between modernism and cosmopolitanism through the work of Irish writers such as Joyce and Yeats, the chapter also explores how a sustained engagement with Irish studies, postcolonial studies and recent developments in Beckett scholarship helps to produce a more richly nuanced account of modernism's different moments and the ways that postcoloniality shapes the transition to a distinct set of late modernist aesthetic practices and the subsequent rise of postmodernism.