How a Canon Is Formed: Censorship, Modernism, and the US Reception of Irish and South African Literature

Abstract

Any scholarly project that purports to trace connections between two countries names a field that is to some degree already there – lying buried in archives, of course, but also contained in habitual ways of seeing and talking about texts. The present special issue is no exception. If it makes sense to search for points of contact between Irish and South African writing, this says as much about how these two literatures have been framed in Anglo-American scholarship as it does about any objective traits that they may share in common. If this is the case, then the most interesting questions for comparative inquiry might have less to do with empirical research into intersections between Irish and South African fiction than with the ideological–institutional matrix that makes such research possible in the first place. What disciplinary pressures have encouraged scholars to turn to texts and authors from outside of the US–UK core? What material conditions of production and reception have made such texts available to Anglo-American culture brokers, and how has this material history influenced their critical valorization? And finally, what concepts, keywords, and methodological approaches do we use when discussing Irish and South African literatures, and what role have these tools played in the growth and consolidation of Anglo-American literary studies? In telling the story of their mutual incorporation into the US canon, my focus will be less on identifying concrete intersections between Ireland and South Africa than on tracing how a shared vocabulary of international modernism developed in and around these literatures. By investigating the history and politics of this process of canon formation, we can gain a better understanding not only of the nature of modernism itself, but of its evolving identity over the course of the twentieth century.