Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Modernist Literature & Culture)
"[Esty's] extensive secondary references, awareness of critical trends, and what the series editors right call his 'admirable stylistic panache' are all impressive. Recommended." --CHOICE"Jed Esty is a fabulous phrase-maker, but his most extraordinary talent is for pattern recognition.  There are breath-taking moments of such recognition throughoutUnseasonable Youth.  Esty is forever uncovering formal patterns that had somehow escaped other observers and always mark interesting changes in the landscape of his genre and period.  It will be hard if not impossible for future readers to think of the modernist bildungsroman without also reflecting on his powerful and original argument." --Bruce Robbins, author ofUpward Mobility and the Common Good"Unseasonable Youthoffers a masterful set of inquiries into the relations among novel theory, empire, fraying national sovereignty, and the sublimations of modernism, and the results are riveting: this is a brilliant, game-changing argument about the literary wages of uneven development.  By forcing an expanded reading of the 'frozen youth' of so many of modernism's protagonists, Esty leads us through some of the most patient, illuminating, and theoretically vivid discussions that I've read in years.  Brimming with insights on every page, erudite and supple, Unseasonable Youth is a joy to read.  Jed Esty has produced a major contribution to the field of modern literary studies." --Janet Lyon, author ofManifestoes: Provocations of the Modern"Powerful in its theoretical engagements, nuanced in its readings of fiction,Unseasonable Youthtransforms our understanding of the bildungsroman in the modernist era. In a series of elegant analyses, Esty shows that the progressive developmental narrative associated with both individual and nation in the nineteenth century was not discarded by the twentieth but disenchanted, deformed, and reconfigured in ways that register the "unshapely time" of imperialism and global capital.Unseasonable Youthrepresents a major intervention in recent debates at the intersection of modernist and postcolonial studies--a book that others will admire, draw upon, and contend with for years to come." --Douglas Mao, author ofFateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960"This ambitious study politicizes the modernist Bildungsroman...Besides its weighty historicism, this book will also be enjoyed for its Kermodean interest in the ordering of time--'the empty chronos that is the dark other of the bildungsroman itself'--the technique of novel writing--'How does such a novel, a tale of endless becoming, function as a narrative?'--and for how, like the meta-Bildungsroman itself, it gently registers the attractions of the genre it deconstructs." --Times Literary Supplement"Undoubtedly an important book for the way in which it provides a new and rich perspective on the work of several canonical authors, something that so often eludes other writers. Ultimately, the same remarkable ability Esty exhibited inA Shrinking Islandfor recognising submerged patterns across a wide range of key texts means thatUnseasonable Youthwill forever change how we think aabout the modernBildungsromanand understand 'the fiction of development'." --Make Magazine