| A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England Subjects: ENGLISH LITERATURE -- 20TH CENTURY -- HISTORY AND CRITICISM; MODERNISM (LITERATURE) -- ENGLAND; LITERATURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY -- ENGLAND -- HISTORY -- 20TH CENTURY; LITERATURE AND SOCIETY -- ENGLAND -- HISTORY -- 20TH CENTURY; ENGLAND -- INTELLECTUAL LIFE -; This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. |