![]() | A Shrinking Island Subjects: Nationalism in literature.; Imperialism in literature.; Postcolonialism in literature.; Literature and society; Literature and anthropology; Modernism (Literature); English literature; 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. |
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