Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel

by David Adams

Overview

Works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. David Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition. The elegantly written and powerfully argued Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in English between 1890 and 1940 in which protagonists journey from the familiar world of Europe to alien colonial worlds. The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams discovers, are often less political or literary than metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major character dies as a result of the journey, inviting reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly, imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an odyssey, with death as the home port. Expanding postcolonial and Marxist theories by drawing on the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg, Adams finds in this preoccupation with mortality a symptom of the failure of secular culture to give meaning to death. This concern, in his view, shapes the ways modernist narratives reinforce or critique imperial culture—the authors project onto British imperial experience their anxieties about the individual's relation to the absolute.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801488863
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/25/2003
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Adams is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Lima.

What People are Saying About This

Karen Lawrence

David Adams tests fiction with theory and theory with fiction, all the while placing his discussion of modernist anxieties in significant historical and political contexts. The persistence of metaphysical questions in an era so profoundly mistrustful of metaphysical answers is one of the most fruitful ironies Adams explores in his book. Hans Blumenberg's anthropological perspective and concept of 'reoccupation' allow Adams to trace cultural continuities where other critics have found radical breaks.

Editorial Reviews

Colonial Odysseys makes a genuine and welcome contribution to the study of modernism and colonial history.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

Adams, of course, is not unique in recognizing a sense of weariness and despair in Nostromo, but his explanation for it is, and so is his discussion of Conrad's philosophy in relation to that of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and even Slavoj Zizek.

Twentieth-Century Literature

Adams provides a good account of how such modernist fiction differs from popular Victorian novels of empire, which lack a similar tension between realism and symbolism. Though thematic concerns predominate. Conrad's language receives considerable attention, as do Woolf's travels to Greece and study of its ancient language.... Besides critics and scholars of literature, philosophers, and theologians will find this study rewarding.... Recommended.

Choice

Colonial Odysseys makes a genuine and welcome contribution to the study of modernism and colonial history.

-- "Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History"

Adam's book is particularly ambitious because it effectively fuses two projects: in addition to an analysis of the British modernists' representations of colonial exploration, it also places these same fictions... within the tradition of the classical epic journey.... Adam's dual focus, which keeps in its sights both the classical literary tradition and the global political scene, does not in the least blur his vision, but indeed allows him to look beyond familiar assessments of both travel writing's cultural function and of modernism's Greco-Roman turn.

-- "Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature"

Adams provides a good account of how such modernist fiction differs from popular Victorian novels of empire, which lack a similar tension between realism and symbolism. Though thematic concerns predominate. Conrad's language receives considerable attention, as do Woolf's travels to Greece and study of its ancient language.... Besides critics and scholars of literature, philosophers, and theologians will find this study rewarding.... Recommended.

-- "Choice"

Adams, of course, is not unique in recognizing a sense of weariness and despair in Nostromo, but his explanation for it is, and so is his discussion of Conrad's philosophy in relation to that of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and even Slavoj Zizek.

-- "Twentieth-Century Literature"

From the Publisher

Adam's book is particularly ambitious because it effectively fuses two projects: in addition to an analysis of the British modernists' representations of colonial exploration, it also places these same fictions... within the tradition of the classical epic journey.... Adam's dual focus, which keeps in its sights both the classical literary tradition and the global political scene, does not in the least blur his vision, but indeed allows him to look beyond familiar assessments of both travel writing's cultural function and of modernism's Greco-Roman turn.

Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature

"David Adams tests fiction with theory and theory with fiction, all the while placing his discussion of modernist anxieties in significant historical and political contexts. The persistence of metaphysical questions in an era so profoundly mistrustful of metaphysical answers is one of the most fruitful ironies Adams explores in his book. Hans Blumenberg's anthropological perspective and concept of 'reoccupation' allow Adams to trace cultural continuities where other critics have found radical breaks."

Karen Lawrence