Précis

I Précis I Heidi Hanrahan University of North Carolina, Greensboro Archives of Empire—Volume I: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Volume II: The Scramble for Africa. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. vii + 802 pp. Paper $34.95 / vii + 821pp. Paper $34.95 The first two volumes of what eventually will be a four-volume set present an impressive collection of texts related to the "varied processes and various procedures of the colonial project." As a whole, the volumes defy easy summary, representing authors ranging from Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad to Karx Marx and John Stuart Mill to Wilkie Collins and Mary Shelley. Volume I, covering the East India Company's initial exploits to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, focuses mainly on the Indian subcontinent. Other highlights include sections on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, suttee/sati, and the Indian Uprising/Sepoy Mutiny. Volume II picks up with the Berlin Conference in 1885 and follows the ensuing crises in Khartoum, the Congo, and the Anglo -Boer War. Also noteworthy are sections entitled "The Body Politic: Rationalizing Race" and "Crises of Empire." With selections ranging from company charters, missionary tracts, satirical cartoons, legislative records, to literary accounts, these anthologies present a fascinating glimpse of the many sides of imperialism. Attridge, Derek, ed. James Joyce's 'Ulysses': A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ν + 274 pp. Paper $16.95 Faced with the difficult task of compiling a casebook of criticism on Joyce's monumental work, Derek Attridge decided, as he explains in his introduction, to include essays which show "a direct engagement with, and pleasure in, Joyce's endlessly evocative words." Combining "classic" texts with more modern approaches, the essays in this collection present a wide and entertaining variety of perspectives on Ulysses. In addition to selections from early yet still indispensable critics like Hugh Kenner and Frank Budgen, Attridge also includes works from psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, and cultural studies criticism . The selection from Emer Nolan's James Joyce and Nationalism, for instance, argues that Ulysses is part of the Irish struggle for independence, although the critic expresses some misgivings about certain theoretical bases of postcolonialism as he challenges "traditional reading of Bloom as a positive embodiment of political values." Other essays of note include Vicki Mahaffey's 366 BOOK REVIEWS discussion of the "problems and paradoxes" of editing Ulysses in the wake of the Gabler edition and traces "some of the fruitful consequences of Joyce's own creative view of error." Perhaps the most daring entry is Leo Bersani's "Against Ulysses," which takes a more skeptical, if still admiring view of the novel than most critics. Especially for students and scholars new to Ulysses, this casebook serves as a strong introduction to the critical conversation. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. ix + 285 pp. Paper $19.95 In this complex and compelling book, Esty takes aim at the commonly held belief that as the British Empire slowly declined in the twentieth century, so too did English literature, which became increasingly "provincial and ex-centric." Instead, he concentrates on late modernism's "indirect and mediated representations of imperial contraction" in the form of an "anthropological turn" in both literature and culture. This anthropological turn, he explains, translated the end of the empire into a "resurgent concept of national culture," a move he connects to the rise of culturalism and a distinctive ethnographic and anti-elitist approach to symbolic practices. Chapter One, "Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England," includes a discussion of E. M. Forster's "specifically English model of metropolitan perception" which provides the basis for subsequent analyses of demetropolization as a "modernist endstage that trades lost civilizational reach for restored cultural integrity." Chapter Two, which includes a discussion of Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts, examines the pageant play in the 1930s and argues that the sudden prominence of this archaic genre points to key dimensions of modernism's closing chapter. In subsequent chapters T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, Mary Butts, and Charles Williams are discussed as further instances of "retrenchment" in...