Irish Literature in Transition, 1880-1940 ed. by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes (review)

Abstract

“world literature” emerges. It is not entirely clear how this profile of the critic within the canonical text relates to those “critics of the center” against whom Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters seeks to liberate the “deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world” (355). In the double vision of Cleary’s American and Irish appropriations of modernism, the critic is simultaneously a critic of the center and a critic from the periphery. Modernism, Empire, World Literature tends toward the conservative side of its ambivalent grasp of anglophone modernism. From this perspective, the great modernist revolutions in form live on only through their appropriation by empire and as monuments to empire’s claim to civilization. From another perspective, though, those monuments themselves bear the linguistic, literary, and cultural traces of a revolutionary destabilization of empire. Cleary leaves us still wanting to find the right balance between the idealistic championing of modernism’s revolutionary peripheries and the melancholic regret for modernism’s role in monumentalizing empire in art.