Unseasonable Youth
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Description
The bildungsroman, with its elegant arc charting a protagonist's progression from childhood to maturity, is one of literature's most familiar and enduring genres. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a series of novels appeared that began to upend this classical formula. Rather than moving smoothly into adulthood, the characters in these new coming of age fictions seemed to veer off course into a state of suspended or stunted adolescence.Modernist-era novels of unseasonable youth disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. Narratives of world progress run up against stubborn developmental obstacles, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and Freudian sexological theories were lending influence to the idea that some forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing forces. In this context, the modernist bildungsroman can be seen as narrating the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.
Jed Esty follows this fascinating line of argument through analysis of novels by Kipling, Wilde, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Rhys, and others to reveal how intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the re-imagination of colonial space at the fin de siecle.
Features
- Reveals how late Victorian and modernist novelists upended and subverted the typical conventions of the rite of passage story
- Brings modernist studies into dialogue with the burgeoning subfield of childhood studies through its examination of adolescence
- Covers seminal bildungsromans by Goethe, Kipling, Wilde, Joyce, and others
Reviews
"[Esty's] extensive secondary references, awareness of critical trends, and what the series editors right call his 'admirable stylistic panache' are all impressive. Recommended." --CHOICE
"Jed Esty is a fabulous phrase-maker, but his most extraordinary talent is for pattern recognition. There are breath-taking moments of such recognition throughout Unseasonable Youth. Esty is forever uncovering formal patterns that had somehow escaped other observers and always mark interesting changes in the landscape of his genre and period. It will be hard if not impossible for future readers to think of the modernist bildungsroman without also reflecting on his powerful and original argument." --Bruce Robbins, author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good
"Unseasonable Youth offers a masterful set of inquiries into the relations among novel theory, empire, fraying national sovereignty, and the sublimations of modernism, and the results are riveting: this is a brilliant, game-changing argument about the literary wages of uneven development. By forcing an expanded reading of the 'frozen youth' of so many of modernism's protagonists, Esty leads us through some of the most patient, illuminating, and theoretically vivid discussions that I've read in years. Brimming with insights on every page, erudite and supple, Unseasonable Youth is a joy to read. Jed Esty has produced a major contribution to the field of modern literary studies." --Janet Lyon, author of Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern
"Powerful in its theoretical engagements, nuanced in its readings of fiction, Unseasonable Youth transforms our understanding of the bildungsroman in the modernist era. In a series of elegant analyses, Esty shows that the progressive developmental narrative associated with both individual and nation in the nineteenth century was not discarded by the twentieth but disenchanted, deformed, and reconfigured in ways that register the "unshapely time" of imperialism and global capital. Unseasonable Youth represents a major intervention in recent debates at the intersection of modernist and postcolonial studies--a book that others will admire, draw upon, and contend with for years to come." --Douglas Mao, author of Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960
About the Author(s)
Jed Esty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Shrinking Island and the coeditor of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.
