This Way, That Way, Forward and Back Way

John Brannigan’s Archipelagic Modernism begins with disaster. Richard Jefferies’s After London (1885) is its starting point – a book which, as Brannigan puts it, ‘imagined a future in which the geography of England has been dramatically altered by environmental catastrophe’ (p. 1). An unspecified event has turned London to swampland and forced power to the provinces. The margins have become not only the centre, but the only ground available; Irish, Scots, and Welsh renegades commit ‘dreadful acts of piracy’ (p. 1). The ‘sympathetic explanation’ given by Jefferies for these acts is, for Brannigan, a suggestion that they might be ‘seen as a kind of moral retribution for the injuries inflicted by England on other peoples’ (p. 2). This is a portrait of a radically redistributed, no-longer-‘British’ Isles catalysed by nature itself, and as such it is a fitting opening for Brannigan’s book, for Archipelagic Modernism traces a literary tradition committed to a ‘plural and connected’ (p. 6) view of the North Atlantic archipelago, stripped of either utopian idealism or Anglocentric, or perhaps more accurately London-centric, myopia.

In this sense, immediate parallels can be drawn between Brannigan’s study and a broader field of modernist criticism: the ‘new modernist studies’. I write this having just returned from the seventeenth Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston, which hosted a wide range of panels on global and, more pertinently here, regional literature. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s call to ‘globalize modernism by identifying new local strains’¹ is heeded in increasingly sophisticated terms. Until recently, scholarship on work produced outside modernism’s urban centres was often confined to what could broadly be termed comparative studies, drawing points of correspondence and divergence between modernist production as it takes place in ‘regional’ sites and the metropole, using the latter to reveal the modernist facets of the former. Yet there is a niggling sense of irresolution to these works, and they are fast being replaced with more nuanced readings which focus on complex systems of cultural exchange. The winner of this year’s MSA book prize, for instance, Janet Poole’s When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea, was praised for its global vision and its ability to ‘repeatedly [move] through Anglo-European modernism’ to take on ‘the broader problem of accounting for temporal rupture, state violence, and the experience of colonization’.²

It is notable, then, that Archipelagic Modernisms begins with a work which renders the former metropolis unfit for purpose. After London, Brannigan points out, is concerned with devolution in two senses, the Darwinian and the administrative; or, more broadly, the biological and the political. Isolated as they are, islands throw into relief the frequent meeting point of these two, related, discourses, and it is the question of what happens at the intersection of material existence – the weather; the sea; biological life – and imagined identities which forms the spine of Archipelagic Modernism’s study. To pursue it, the book undertakes its own redistribution, beginning with the terminology of its title. ‘We use the term “archipelago”’, Brannigan writes, ‘to denote a group of islands, and to stress in neutral and plural terms the relationship between those islands’ (p. 9). With the advent of air travel and the increasing colonisation of the sea as a ‘purely metaphorical realm of imaginary danger, or imaginary freedom’ in the capitalist mythos (p. 9), the sea is often absent from discussions of both modernism and modernity – yet Brannigan excavates a ‘strong counter-tradition in twentieth century anglophone literature’ which encounters ‘the seas and the islands within them’ as material, rather than conceptual, spaces (p. 9). This revision is an urgent one, and not only in scholarly terms. Describing the pollution of the Irish Sea by a nuclear plant in Sellafield, Cumbria, as the ‘most toxic issue in Anglo-Irish relations’ to occur in the late twentieth century ‘besides the conflict in Northern Ireland’, Brannigan reminds us that...