Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis examines the literary contours of social relations, space, and community under the global capitalist formations of the first half of the twentieth century. Examining international structures of feeling with particular reference to the literary and social contexts of Aotearoa New Zealand and southern Africa, the thesis extends materialist analysis of the relationship of literary production and aesthetic cultures to the social processes of the world-system. It is especially attentive to the antagonistic procedures of the world-system and the literary-political projects which seek to confront these procedures. The further interests of the thesis lie in modernism, the poetics and politics of resistance, and the historical development of images of communion across transnational formations. Drawing on original archival work conducted in Europe, North America, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, the thesis produces its analysis by engaging recondite literary texts as well as prominent figures. Its key theoretical coordinates include Marxism, postcolonial literary studies, and the historiography of imperialism and economy. The thesis has three chapters. Chapter One interrogates the spatialising of social relations within imperialist capitalism, examining its aesthetic presentation and strategies. In this chapter, I analyse writers such as Daphne de Waal, James Inman Emery, and Blanche Baughan, attending to their depictions of formal subsumption, infrastructural development, and frictious senses of imperialist connection. Chapter Two examines internationalist structures of feeling of particularly the 1930s. It examines how three writers, William Plomer, Robin Hyde, and Peter Abrahams, evince different preoccupations with circumstances of affiliation and disaffiliation across the spatio temporal articulation of the world-system. Despite very clear political differences, I argue that the continuity of this preoccupation between all three writers evidences how social relations at non-local scales presented with particular urgency in this period. Chapter Three, the final chapter, examines the social presence and political interventions of what can be termed literary internationalism. It comprises a historical-literary itinerary of the leftwing news agency, Democratic & General News, run by Eric and Freda Cook in London between 1936 and 1950. This anticolonial, antifascist, and socialist news agency—which I delineate for the first time—I argue evidences how the enterprises of internationalist literary production are enmeshed with other forms of social praxis. Accordingly, I argue that it offers a concrete, if mediated, instance of internationalist art as political intervention.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2023
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Williams, Joe
- Advisors dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Gopal, Priyamvada
- Warnes, Christopher
Subjects
dc:subject × 1Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.114841
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/378485