This dissertation argues that the literature of a fading, Atlantic-imperial system of mines and plantations had a decisive and under-examined impact upon twentieth-century globalization. Adopting a world-systems perspective, this project investigates how the literature of declining Anglo settler classes in particular, the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-South Africans constructed a series of stylized emotional dispositions so as to position these classes as mediators between rising national movements and an emerging global economy. Turning to novels, plays, and non-fiction prose by a British-based group of colonial writers who mixed dissident and privileged politics in equal parts Olive Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, William Plomer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Elizabeth Bowen, J. M. Keynes, and J. M. Coetzee Affective Transnationalism shows how the Anglo-Irish Big House novel, the South African plaasroman/farm novel, and the South African mine novel provided familiar images of an older Atlantic semiperiphery through which to make sense of an emergent, despatialized semiperiphery governed by professionalized labor and emotional ambivalence. Where the Atlantic mines and plantations featured in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-South African fiction had translated between local, highly-racialized labor systems and metropolitan commodity markets, twentieth-century globalization and the concomitant growth of finance capitalism caused both local, national-political institutions and global economic institutions to exist in the same space. This dissertation thus examines how Anglo settlers developed a formalist epistemology of emotion in which ambivalent emotions like sympathy, envy, hysteria, stoicism, and ecstasy enabled them to orient themselves simultaneously toward national-political and global-economic institutions, thereby using their own increasingly-negligent semiperiphery as a model for the new semiperiphery they now occupied as budding professionals. Most important, by using the Atlantic semiperiphery as a generic model for their experiments with affect, Schreiner, Shaw, Plomer, Millin, Bowen, and Coetzee reveal how literary and economic structural forms repeat across time in a discontinuous historical trajectory. Thus, in contrast to the evolving technologies, political forms, and economic logics we normally associate with globalization, the affective mediations we find in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-South African literature illustrate the formal continuity behind the various material and affective technologies tasked with organizing discrepant economies into a global world-system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07202012-184232 |
| Date | 02 August 2012 |
| Creators | Eatough, Matthew |
| Contributors | Mark Wollaeger, Jay Clayton, Jonathan Lamb, Jed Esty |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07202012-184232/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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