Review of 'Modernism, Empire, World Literature' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
when i first read it cleary's 'outrageous fortune' was the greatest work of literary criticism i had read at the time. it resolved a number of the critical debates regarding ireland's national literary tradition, what it was, how and why it deviated from england's literary realism, how this irish tradition cognitively mapped or responded to the particularities of ireland's social development under the british yoke
here cleary is doing something a bit more global, beginning with pascale casanova's (in)famous idea that in much the same way that there is a world market and global economic capitalist system with clear winners and losers, that there is also a world literary system, with inputs, outputs, centres of gravity, internationally transmitted styles or modes that develop precedence for specific reasons. having taken this system as a foundation, cleary introduces significantly more dialectical materialism by way of arrighi, identifying modernism as a response or …
when i first read it cleary's 'outrageous fortune' was the greatest work of literary criticism i had read at the time. it resolved a number of the critical debates regarding ireland's national literary tradition, what it was, how and why it deviated from england's literary realism, how this irish tradition cognitively mapped or responded to the particularities of ireland's social development under the british yoke
here cleary is doing something a bit more global, beginning with pascale casanova's (in)famous idea that in much the same way that there is a world market and global economic capitalist system with clear winners and losers, that there is also a world literary system, with inputs, outputs, centres of gravity, internationally transmitted styles or modes that develop precedence for specific reasons. having taken this system as a foundation, cleary introduces significantly more dialectical materialism by way of arrighi, identifying modernism as a response or means of mediating britain's 'autumnal' productive moment, both as a global superpower as well as a centre for literary value. within this model, from the 1890s onward, london is increasingly eclipsed, first by american and irish émigres in paris and then by the nouveau riche in new york
as with any attempt to locate turning points in literary history relative to global economic and political developments, the devil is in the detail, cf. franco moretti's work for when broad generalisation along the lines of the latter begin to seriously distort the object under consideration. however cleary's erudition and seriousness cannot be doubted and it is not just the case that he has assembled five or six convenient case studies of canonical figures that slot in neatly, the depth that is attained here, considering it is just over 300 pages, is really impressive and modernism, empire, world literature deserves to be read and rated alongside bradbury, williams, eysteinsson, burger as one of the best causative accounts of the literary avant-gardes of the twentieth century