A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England

Introduction
LATE MODERNISM AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN
BOTH professional and lay readers in America seem to share an intuitive belief that English literature has suffered a steady decline in the twentieth century and, moreover, that the decline can be correlated to and even explained by the contraction of British power. Yet few would argue that geopolitical power corresponds in a predictable way to literary creativity. If anything, the evidence from the past century points to an inverse relation. We find celebrated literary booms in Revivalist Ireland and in Cold-War Latin America, classic instances of aesthetic experimentation in the semi-peripheral avant-gardes of Russian and Italian futurism, a high index of formal invention in the "minor literature" of Kafka and Beckett, and linguistic exuberance flowing out of the relative backwaters of Joyce's Liffey and Faulkner's Mississippi.1 And yet the idea persists that postimperial English writing, in becoming provincial and excentric, also became stale and wan. This view is not restricted to outsiders; consider a fairly typical 1966 statement from the novelist Anthony Burgess:
What subject-matter does England provide (or Wales or Scotland or Northern Ireland or the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man)? Not, I would say, the subject-matter of an expansive vision, which, whatever Americans may think, is there in America for the American writer's taking. Some of us got in just in time to record a dying, or heroically relinquished, empire. The transition from free society to welfare state provided material for a few novels, but the theme has lost all its vitality.2
Burgess's complaint reflects not, I think, a real relation between lost political and artistic power but the recurrent tendency of commentators on the English scene to metaphorize literary change as national decline. That metaphorical habit causes a great deal of critical haziness; it sustains myths of a fallen heritage in the land of Shakespeare, of an island's poetic sourcewaters run dry, of the death of the English (but not anglophone) novel. If we cast these myths aside, what precisely is the relationship between British imperial contraction and the shape of English literary culture?
Since elegists of English literature tend to date its decline to the eclipse of high modernism, we can restate this question in terms of modernism's original relationship to British hegemony: what accounts for the apparently coterminous lifespans of high modernism and high imperialism in the British sphere? How, in other words, was English modernism shaped and inflected, not just by the accumulation and concentration of economic, social, and cultural power in metropolitan London from 1880 to 1930, but by the relative diffusion of that power during the period from 1930 to 1960? The most widely held views about the end of modernism have tended to concentrate on causal factors associated with European politics (the rise of fascism and the dampening effects of World War II), economics (the depression that ran through the thirties), and culture (the growing threat to high art from mass media in the age of radio, cinema, and television). This study aims to extend those explanatory models by giving sustained consideration to the relationship between a fading imperialism and the putative death of English modernism (understood as the last major phase of English literature). Rather than describe the collapse of British power and the diminishment of English literature in terms of direct causality or--equally implausibly--in terms of mere coincidence, the chapters that follow concentrate on late modernism's indirect and mediated representations of imperial contraction in the form of an "anthropological turn" manifested in both cultural doctrine and literary style.
In this book, the anthropological turn names the discursive process by which English intellectuals translated the end of empire into a resurgent concept of national culture--one whose insular integrity seemed to mitigate some of modernism's characteristic social agonies while rendering obsolete some of modernism's defining aesthetic techniques. A Shrinking Island offers, in effect, a literary prehistory to the anthropological turn that Colin MacCabe, following a more conventional periodization, describes as having made postwar English culture into "an object of study like any other, privileged only by historical accident and not by some immanent qualities."3 Defined against the assumptions of traditional English literary criticism, the anthropological turn more or less corresponds to the rise of "culturalism," that is, to an ethnographic and anti-elitist approach to symbolic practices whose classic institutional form is Birmingham-school Cultural Studies.