A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England
Esty argues that the imperial contraction of the 1920s and 1930s was paralleled by an "anthropological turn" in late modernist writing. Taking his bearings from Fredric Jameson, Esty sees imperial losses as recuperated by the return to England as subject matter and source of deep community and meaning, a "romantic dream of insularity." While generally accomplished, this study lacks a firm sense of historical understanding. As to the notion of Englishness, Esty promulgates a view not very different from Kipling's in 1902: "England is . . . the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have ever been in. It is made up of trees and green fields and mud and the gentry. . . . " We don't often stray from the Home Counties in these pages. Esty sees the rise of cultural studies as the enriching outcome of political contraction: literature handing on the baton to culture. This is not a relay race I recognize, and of course it leaves out poetry, despite tantalizing references to Hughes and Co.
Eliot, Forster, and Woolf are Esty's exemplars: how rewarding it would have been to replace Forster's limp Abinger pageants with Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, whose complicated version of Englishness has George Herbert at its heart, alongside the ineradicable wound of the war. Doubtless it is naive to suggest that a theoretically well-armored study, which offers a persuasive account of Four Quartets and the style of G. M. Keynes, lacks a sense of "England" that is not learned from books. Yet that was what I missed.
Robyn Marsack, a critic and translator, is director of the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. She is the author of Sylvia Plath and The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice, and editor or coeditor of My Garden: Selected from the Letters and Recollections of Mary Russel Mitford and Intimate Expanses: Twenty-Five Scottish Poems, 1978-2002.
