A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (review)

Since so many works of world literature were written in proximity to centers of military and political power, it has been tempting to presume that the more guns one has the better one's literature will be. To be sure, exile and marginality have been conducive to the literary production of modernity, but the power equation has shaped the study of modern literature, including British modernism, quite frequently. The loss of the British Empire between 1940 and 1960 seemed to correspond neatly to a loss in literary excellence, with the heroic modernists of the first decades of the twentieth century giving way to generations of minor ones. It is this commonly-held narrative of the decline of modernism that Jed Esty's excellent book, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, fundamentally revises. Esty does so not by arguing for the superior quality of late modernist literature, although his superb and nuanced readings make many of these works seem fresh and compelling. Rather, he proposes an entirely new understanding of the cultural production of this tumultuous period, by artfully connecting the late works of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf with the romances of J. C. Powys, J. R. R. Tolkien and Mary Butts, but also with the economist J. M. Keynes and the founders of the Birmingham school of cultural studies. The result is nothing less than a new charting of the literary topography of late modernism in Britain.

In the place of the cosmopolitan generations that include James Joyce, Henry James and early Woolf, Esty tracks the process by which questions of cultural unity and authentic Englishness became newly central. The first chapter analyzes the transition from the earlier cosmopolitan internationalism to this new Anglo-centric culturalism through what Esty calls the "anthropological turn." The vectors of imperial expansion are directed toward England itself, which becomes the object of its own imperial discourse. E. M. Forster as well as the later careers of Woolf and Eliot serve as handy demarcations of this retrenchment.

The second chapter, in many ways the core of the book, applies this frame to an overlooked genre: the pageant play. Here we have an explicitly Anglo-centric ritual through which a great nation, finding itself in the process of shrinking back to the status of an island, celebrates its insularity. Surprisingly, even former modernist cosmopolitans such as Eliot, Forster, and Woolf turned to this genre in the thirties, creating such works as Woolf's Between the Acts, Eliot's The Rock, Forster's Abinger Pageant and England's Pleasant Land. Esty cautions us not to dismiss the fascination with the pageant play visible in such texts as mere parody, but to view it, rather, as a genuine signal of the renewed currency this echt Englishness had for former cosmopolitan ironists. It is from here that fascinating lines and lineages offer themselves, connecting late modernist literature to the Birmingham school, for which the island and its distinct indigenous culture becomes a privileged object of study. The chapter captures the literary sensibility of late modernism and thus contributes significantly to literary studies. It should also be read by students and scholars in theater history and performance studies since it demonstrates how profitably the study of modernist literature can be combined with the study of performance.

The book subsequently turns to a reading of Eliot's elusive Four Quartets as a response to similar concerns about national integrity and cultural cohesion. It would probably have been easier to move from the pageant play to Eliot's drama, whose concern with Thomas à Becket, community, and the collective chorus echoes tendencies that relate to the ones discussed in chapter one. More provocatively, Esty turns to the Four Quartets and finds in them what he terms "insular time." Through discussions of Eliot's interest in ritual, Esty shows how Eliot, after converting to the Anglican church and becoming a British subject, rediscovered culture as a national...