On Twentieth-Century Literature’s Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, 2020

Abstract

The winner of this year’s prize is Annabel Williams’s “Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West.” The judge is Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University and editor of PMLA. Her books include Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (1996), Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Shades of the Planet (2007), and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017). Other writings have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her new book, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (2020), was just published.This year’s winning essay, “Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West,” is exemplary in more ways than one. It makes a wide-ranging and richly historicized claim on behalf of an undertheorized genre: fantasy. It does so by redrawing the architectural as well as geopolitical maps of literature, putting London and Belgrade in each other’s orbit, linking the Georgian mansions of Portland Place to Emperor Diocletian’s palace in Split, Dalmatia. And it puts at the center of modernism two overlooked works by Rebecca West: Harriet Hume (1929) and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), using these as entry points to a literary network at once populous and phantasmagoric, utterly familiar yet thrillingly off-key. Feminism here crosses paths with imperialism, and characters from E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf mingle with those from Katherine Mayo and Sylvia Townsend Warner as gendered witchcraft and statecraft collide, in the UK and in India and Yugoslavia.Jacqueline Rose, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel de Certeau, and Edward Said frame these discussions. But the essay is most striking in its granular engagement with the entire West corpus, often drawing on her reviews of other authors to cast light on her own works. West’s definition of fantasy as “the medium which just at this moment” enables authors to be “true children of our age” is taken, for instance, from the 1929 “London Letter” she wrote for the New York–based Bookman, praising David Garnet’s Lady into Fox (1922), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The True Heart (1929), and Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). This conception of fantasy as grounded in geopolitics made it possible for West to invoke the 1389 Battle of Kosovo—sealing the fate of the Serbs in the hands of the Ottoman Empire—as a template for understanding British colonialism as it grappled with the demand for self-rule in India. It also allowed her to set herself apart from the Bloomsbury intellectuals, who, according to her, tended “to use the words ‘nationalism’ and ‘imperialism’ as if they meant the same thing.” For West, “There is not the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism, which is the desire of a people to prevent other peoples from being themselves.”Still, the essay makes it clear that West herself is not altogether immune from imperialist urgings. Even as Harriet Hume makes fun of a gullible British public embracing a fictitious “Mondh” as the crown jewel of the British Raj, it names the Indian prince who exploits that gullibility “Caramalzaman,” a name taken from One Thousand and One Nights, popularized in the 1920s by the Ballets Russes’ adaptation of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The stylistic extravagance of Harriet Hume, like the stylistic extravagance of Woolf ’s Orlando, is steeped in the cultural medium that it dissects. It is a modernism that is “part conflict, part dance.” Even as it “deflates the colonizing impulse,” it “plunders its tropes to enrich the novel’s fantastic backdrop.” Tracing this contrapuntal dynamics, the essay gives us a genre saturated by the world and overflowing in its excess, a genre as alive in our own time as it was a century ago.The Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism, named for the late critic and esteemed deputy editor of Twentieth-Century Literature, is awarded annually to the author of a work submitted to the journal during the preceding year that is judged to make the most impressive contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the literature of the twentieth century. Nominees are chosen by the editor of Twentieth-Century Literature and members of the editorial board. A different prominent literary critic serves each year as judge.