A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England

by Joshua Esty

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s.


Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Nicole]

I feel like I'm 10-15 years late to this party, but this book was a good time! This book had already shaped (inter?)modernist studies (or New Modernist Studies?) by the time I was in grad school, and so reading *A Shrinking Island* felt both familiar and revelatory. I wanted to read it because I'm working on a project that incorporates the New Left cultural studies guys like Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, and Esty gets there, but I really loved his treatment of Forster, Woolf, Eliot, plus Sam Selvon, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Graham Greene--as my dissertation co-supervisor would say approvingly, "there are a lot of texts." He takes a counter-intuitive approach to some of the most privileged terms in my field of study--the metropolitan, the cosmopolitan--and sort of looks at them upside down, almost? via the development of an anthropological literary method. It felt like a new, cool perspective for this interwar-to-postwar period of British (English) lit that is often undervalued. It might just be that I haven't read a recent-ish monograph so squarely about literary studies in a while, but it was decent bedtime reading for a month or two.

[Candy Wood]

Jed Esty’s main purpose is to trace the development of the Birmingham Cultural Studies movement from the late modernist works of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster, representing not a decline in literary quality to match England’s decline as an imperial power but instead a shift to a new cultural awareness. He sees what he calls an anthropological turn, a “demetropolitanization” that downplays universalizing art to build up a shared national culture. Discussions of the pageant-play form and the three writers’ involvement with it are particularly interesting, as is the reading of Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Esty looks at J. M. Keynes’s books on economics as illustrating the same shift. It does seem strange, though, that Woolf and Doris Lessing are the only women writers mentioned (Lessing gets about a page). Still, it’s useful to consider modernism as not dying but transforming into something else.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, brilliant, and tremendously scholarly. 4.5 stars. Highly synthetic in the Jameson mold, with some of the downsides to that - at times I wanted Esty to lean harder on the political differences among the figures he writes about, whereas his emphasis is on their commonalities, produced by a shared historical location. His major writers here are Forster, Eliot, and Woolf, but I was particularly interested in what he said about figures to whom he gives secondary attention, such as Cultural Studies giants Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson (interestingly, he put Thompson with Williams and Hoggart instead of with Hobsbawm as an historiographer) and the "Oxford fantastists" (Tolkien et al). An essential book for those interested in the intellectual life of 20th c Britain.

[Chris Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jed Esty is the nicest man alive. I really ought to read his book.

[Duncan M Simpson]

Shifted my understanding of post-modernism, and made me read Woolf and Eliot differently.