After the West: Conrad and Nabokov in Long-Wave Literary History

Abstract

AbstractThe Secret Agent and Lolita are among the most influential novels of the last century. Both describe European lodgers who insinuate themselves into nuclear families that serve as symbolic cocoons inside the most powerful nation-states on earth in 1907 and 1955, respectively. These two upmarket infiltration novels track an uneasy movement into the heart of Anglo-American darkness. Taken together, they also describe the arc of cultural capital traveling across the Atlantic. They orbit a myth of the stable West that can be neither disavowed nor dismantled. What can we learn now from the historical relation between these novels, set within the dilapidated metanarratives of Pax Britannica and the American Century? Is there a post-Western future for anglophone literary studies? To address those questions, this essay combines close formal analysis of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov with a test run of current world systems and longue durée reading methods.