Description

Early in the twentieth century, many novelists and geographers were attempting a similar undertaking: to connect everyday human experience to the large, unseen structures that formed the planet itself. World Views shows how both modernist and postcolonial writers borrowed metaphors and concepts from geography, advancing theories of space, culture, and community within the formal structures of literary narrative.

In contrast to the pervasive sense of the globe as a "jigsaw-puzzle" of nations, writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amitav Ghosh imagined alternative versions of the world that were made up of other spatial building blocks-continents, regions, islands, and boundaries, to name a few. Hegglund argues that much of what scans as modernist experimentation with fictional form is simply another, more geographically based kind of realism: one that pushes the structural and stylistic resources of the novel to account for those abstract spaces beyond immediate, local human experience. Hegglund therefore extends many accounts of modernist and postcolonial studies by showing how writers on all sides of imperial and colonial conflict were concerned not just with the particularities of local place and cultural identity, but also with the overarching structures that could potentially encompass a single, unified earth.

Through this sustained attention to both the micro-details of narrative aesthetics and the macro-scale of world geography, World Views adds a new and valuable perspective to both literary and cultural accounts of globalization.

Features

• Encompasses a wide range of modernist literature that includes works not only by modernist mainstays like Conrad and Joyce, but also newer novelists outside the traditional fold like Jamaica Kincaid and Amitav Ghosh
• Interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars of critical geography, literary history, and modernist studies
• Contributes to the growing body of work that looks at modernism in a global context by drawing on works from India, Ireland, England, the Dominican Republic, and Antigua

Reviews

"Hegglund's methodological aims in World Views are as daring as his prose is lucid. His book undertakes 'to read literature as geography by other means' and, conversely, to read geographical texts as literary (or at least rhetorical) in their reliance on various symbols, tropes, and codes of representation. The result is a genuinely interdisciplinary book: a refreshing, readable, well-organized and nuanced contribution to the new global modernist studies." --Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania

"In World Views, Jon Hegglund makes the audacious claim that in the modernist era the imagination became geographic in a new way. Ranging widely in the borderlands of modernist and postcolonial writing, and of geography and literature, this beautifully written book offers a sweeping reassessment of modernism's scale-bending experiments, and thus of modernism's take on all space. World Views brilliantly recasts the spatial geopolitics of modernism." --Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara

"World Views is a superb book that provocatively intervenes into current debates on global modernisms. In a set of exciting studies of diverse writers such as James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Amitav Ghosh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Hegglund produces a persuasive account of how we should read literary modernism as geography by other means. World Views sets a new spatial agenda for modernist studies and should be read by all interested in the field." --Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University

"By charting a geographic turn beginning in early twentieth-century writing, World Views offers a fresh approach to understanding fiction from modernism to the present day. Hegglund provides a carefully historicized, bracingly argued account of the continents and regions, oceans and borders that abound in twentieth-century 'novels that work like maps.'" --John Marx, University of California

Product Details

224 pages; 3 illustrations; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-979610-6ISBN10: 0-19-979610-6

About the Author(s)