Peter J. Kalliney's Books

Commonwealth of Letters

British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

By: Peter J. Kalliney

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Commonwealth of Letters

British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics

By: Peter J. Kalliney

Commonwealth of Letters examines midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s-such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender-come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers-including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original and extensive archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, T.S. Eliot's notion of impersonality could help recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but as Commonwealth of Letters shows, it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

333

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199977984

ISBN 13

9780199977987

The Aesthetic Cold War

Decolonization and Global Literature

By: Peter J. Kalliney

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Aesthetic Cold War

Decolonization and Global Literature

By: Peter J. Kalliney

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney's extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

336

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

069123065X

ISBN 13

9780691230658

Cities of Affluence and Anger

A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness

By: Peter Kalliney

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Cities of Affluence and Anger

A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness

By: Peter Kalliney

Providing a compact literary history of the twentieth century in England, Cities of Affluence and Anger studies the problematic terms of national identity during England's transition from an imperial power to its integration in the global cultural marketplace. While the countryside had been the dominant symbol of Englishness throughout the previous century, modern literature began to turn more and more to the city to redraw the boundaries of a contemporary cultural polity. The urban class system, paradoxically, still functioned as a marker of wealth, status, and hierarchy throughout this long period of self-examination, but it also became a way to project a common culture and mitigate other forms of difference. Local class politics were transformed in such a way that enabled the English to reframe a highly provisional national unity in the context of imperial disintegration, postcolonial immigration, and, later, globalization. Kalliney plots the decline of the country-house novel through an analysis of Forster’s Howards End and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, each ruthless in its sabotage of the trope of bucolic harmony. The traditionally pastoral focus of English fiction gives way to a high-modernist urban narrative, exemplified by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and, later, to realists such as Osborne and Sillitoe, through whose work Kalliney explores postwar urban expansion and the cultural politics of the welfare state. Offering fresh new readings of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the author considers the postwar appropriation of domesticity, the emergence of postcolonial literature, and the renovation of travel narratives in the context of globalization. Kalliney suggests that it is largely one city--London--through which national identity has been reframed. How and why this transition came about is a process that Cities of Affluence and Anger depicts with exceptional insight and originality.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

336

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813939003

ISBN 13

9780813939001

Modernism in a Global Context

By: Peter Kalliney

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Modernism in a Global Context

By: Peter Kalliney

Exploring the transnational dimension of literary modernism and its increasing centrality to our understanding of 20th-century literary culture, Modernism in a Global Context surveys the key issues and debates central to the 'global turn' in contemporary Modernist Studies. Topics covered include: - Transnational exchanges between Western and non-Western literary cultures - Imperialism and the Modernism - Cosmopolitanism and postcolonial literatures - Global literary institutions - from the Little Magazine to the Nobel Prize - Mass media - photography, cinema, and radio broadcasting in the modernist age Exploring the work of writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie and critics such as Edward Said, Pascale Casanova, Paul Gilroy, and Gayatri Spivak amongst many others, the book also includes a comprehensive annotated guide to further reading and online resources.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

201

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472569636

ISBN 13

9781472569639

The Aesthetic Cold War

Decolonization and Global Literature

By: Peter J. Kalliney

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Aesthetic Cold War

Decolonization and Global Literature

By: Peter J. Kalliney

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

336

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

069123065X

ISBN 13

9780691230658

Cities of Affluence and Anger

A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness

By: Peter Kalliney

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Cities of Affluence and Anger

A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness

By: Peter Kalliney

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

336

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813939003

ISBN 13

9780813939001

Book's by Peter J. Kalliney

Commonwealth of Letters

Commonwealth of Letters

The Aesthetic Cold War

The Aesthetic Cold War

Cities of Affluence and Anger

Cities of Affluence and Anger

Modernism in a Global Context

Modernism in a Global Context

The Aesthetic Cold War

The Aesthetic Cold War

Cities of Affluence and Anger

Cities of Affluence and Anger

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email