Modernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernism, Empire, World Literature by Joe Cleary Liam Lanigan Modernism, Empire, World Literature, by Joe Cleary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 326 p., hardcover, $39.99) Studies of the "literary world system" theorize and describe a unified but unequal structure of literary relations spanning the globe, in which national literatures are stratified and compete with one another for prestige and cultural hegemony. This system interacts with, but exists separately from, other world systems such as those of capital and ecology. These theories have challenged definitions of "world literature" that emphasize universal literary values, emphasizing the role of cultural domination, geopolitics, and capital in the creation of literary hierarchies. The most comprehensive theorization is Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (1999), which described Paris as the center of the literary world system during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing writers from the literary "periphery" seeking to make a name for themselves and their national traditions. For Casanova, Irish modernism provides a key model for understanding how a literature develops from a position of peripherality to becoming world literary in its ambition and influence. Casanova further notes the role of Irish writers, especially James Joyce, in catalyzing similar literary revolutions in other literary peripheries. Irish literary scholarship has challenged the details of Casanova's work, but largely avoided substantial critique or extension of her thesis. Joe Cleary's Modernism, Empire, World Literature rectifies this, acknowledging that Casanova's work reorients our understanding of how modern literary traditions take shape and intersect, but noting that her model of the world system is "troublingly static." Paris is "extraordinarily fixed and stable" as the center of Casanova's world system. Her theory explains how national literatures secure recognition, but does not allow for major reconfigurations of the system's structure. For Cleary, the unipolar vision of the literary world system centered on Paris overlooks other centers of cultural consecration, especially London, which did not simply challenge Paris for supremacy but propagated and consecrated a different literary aesthetics for the Anglophone world. Cleary historicizes a "crucial moment of rupture" in the literary world system, precipitated by the emergence [End Page 149] of US, Irish, and Caribbean modernisms as the preeminent Anglophone literary traditions of the twentieth century. With these countries long considered cultural colonies of Britain, the emergence of their modernisms transformed the literary world system "more convulsively and with more lasting effect than Casanova's account allows." Cleary reconsiders how the literary world system is shaped by transformations in economic and political systems; Ireland's literary emergence is inseparable from anti-colonial agitation and England's imperial decline, while the rise of the United States is tied to its increasing economic and political dominance and the consolidation of its universities as arbiters of cultural legitimacy. For Cleary the literary world system does not simply describe literary relationships; through readings of key modernist texts, he shows how world-systemic conditions inform their formal and thematic elements, and how they establish new relationships within the literary world system. Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique and Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature, Cleary argues, help explain the contradiction whereby the United States and Ireland, despite the republican and democratic ideals central to both their political cultures, gave rise to an aristocratic-minded, elitist modernism. W. B. Yeats draws upon Arnoldian essentialism about the Celtic national character while rejecting Arnold's call for political and cultural union with Britain. Tocqueville's America is "a byword for democracy, [and] material progress," a "polar contrast" to Arnold's Celticist Ireland. But both countries share a sense of high culture as out of kilter with liberal-democratic modernity, and as capable of a national "renaissance" in defiance of their cultural peripherality. While Yeats and the Celtic Revival sought out a mythic Irish heritage through which to challenge modernity, Ezra Pound and the Americans embrace a futurist aesthetic; both, though, channel antipathy to the modern liberal state and cultural marginalization within the literary world system. Cleary reads Henry James's The Golden Bowl and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in the context of European imperial decline, stressing that they are...