[Book Review]: "Modernism, Empire, World Literature"

Abstract

Readers approaching a book entitled Modernism, Empire, World Literature will have their own understanding of what ‘modernism’ and ‘world’ mean in relation to ‘literature’. A quick look at the book’s contents page reveals that for Joe Cleary, the world is comprised of England, Ireland, and the USA, with the Caribbean thrown in to round up the ‘empire’. The volume is divided into chapters that offer what seem, at least to this reader, to be separate and well-informed expositions of works of literature such as The Golden Bowl (1904), The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Long Day’s Journey into the Night (1956), with Omeros (1990) providing the imperial coda at the end. ‘Empire’, as described in the book, is a burden that England has relinquished to the USA, a crown that sits uneasily on the usurper’s head. Modernism, Empire, World Literature operates on the centre–periphery binary...