This dissertation provides the first critical account of modernism as a constitutional culture. I explore how key Anglophone modernists responded to the emergence of federal governance as a national norm and international ideal, with particular focus on the movement for British imperial federation and the forms of postcolonial governance it influenced during the twentieth century. Intervening in recent methodological debates over the social effects of literary form, I develop an interdisciplinary analysis of literature's relationship to informal constitutional change and write literary history as alternative constitutional history. Through close reading and original historical and archival research, I show how writers incorporated federalism's logic of plural perspectives and distributed sovereignty while also registering unacknowledged forms of racial apartheid, or what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “negative federation.”
By identifying modernist fiction’s critical relationship to liberal federalism, I argue that modernism’s distinctive formal disruptions mediated the changing constitutional form of states across the Anglophone world. My introduction surveys the Anglo-American discourse of federation and defines the study’s central concepts of racial capitalism, modernist formal decadence, and informal constitutional change. Chapter one explores ways in which Oscar Wilde's study of political philosophy and his 1882 visit to the southern United States influenced his critical views on imperial federation and his development of the gothic Bildungsroman as a means of portraying metropolitan constitutional corruption. Chapter two places Virginia Woolf's novels on the timeline of constitutional reforms that prolonged British rule in India, demonstrating that her characters' identity crises and her invention of a style of modernist national biography reflected attempts to redefine the Empire as a quasi-federal Commonwealth. Chapter three analyzes the historical and romance elements in William Faulkner’s fiction, arguing that his attention to liberal federalism’s economic foundations produces a collection of constitutional apocrypha that disrupts the perspectives and assumptions of white supremacy. The conclusion sketches liberal federalism’s postcolonial trajectories through case studies of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, and Salman Rushdie. The narratives I examine indicate modernist fiction’s ability to amplify what modern political theory refers to as “constituent power”: the disruptive influence of subjects who have been excluded from the liberal state’s formally constituted power.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/41914 |
| Date | 22 January 2021 |
| Creators | Weberling, Ryan D. |
| Contributors | Riquelme, John Paul, Matthews, John T. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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