Modernism, empire, world literature

"After World War I, American, Irish and then Caribbean writers boldly remade the literary world system long dominated by Paris and London. Responding to literary "renaissances" and social upheavals in their own countries and to the decline of war-devastated Europe, émigré and domestic-based modernists produced dazzling new works that challenged London's or Paris's authority to determine literary value and propounded their own notions of critical merit, these later codified as "Modernism." However, after World War II, an assertive American literary establishment repurposed the literature that had once challenged English and French literary authority to boost the cultural prestige of the United States in the cold war and to contest Soviet conceptions of "world literature." Here, in strong readings of major works and essays by Henry James, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill and Derek Walcott, Joe Cleary situates Anglophone modernism in terms of the rise and fall of European and American empires and disputed histories of "world literature.""--

"A language that was English" : peripheral modernisms and the remaking of empire in the republic of letters in the age of empire -- "It uccedes Lundun" : logics of literary decline and "renaissance" from Tocqueville and Arnold to Yeats and pound -- "The insolence of empire" : the fall of the House of Europe and emerging American ascendancy in The golden bowl and The waste land -- Contesting wills : Joyce, Yeats, Goethe, Shakespeare and mimetic rivalries in Ulysses -- "That huge incoherent failure of a house" : antinomies of American literature in The great Gatsby and Long day's journey into night -- "Cities that open like The world's classics" : Omeros and epic impasse in the neolberal world literary system.