Secular modernism and the sacred journey.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 246
Description: Chapter One proposes that the travel novels of Rose Macaulay, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf translate the trope of pilgrimage into a modernist context of mobility and multiplicity. Central to these works is the notion of homage: a tribute to the past that provides a new way of seeing the path toward the future. Chapter Two employs Heidegger's quasi-sacred conception of dwelling to examine the modernist traveller's desire to belong to a foreign culture. In works by Forster and Henry James, the critical intersection between the travelling narrative and the courtship plot transforms the journey from an acquisitive quest for cultural capital into an attempt at interpersonal and intercultural communication. The third chapter discusses three novels of expatriatism. As Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and McKay represent the experience of the American expatriate in Europe, they question constructions of class, nation, ethnicity, and racial purity, and espouse a mobile expatriate identity that redefines home in terms of transient communities rather than fixed locations. My final chapter examines how the modernist configuration of both home and exile is transformed by an understanding of travel in novels by Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, and Virginia Woolf. I argue that as critiques of colonialism reconfigure the relationship between home and abroad, they also transform the modernist understanding of the homeland or nation.This thesis explores the relationship between the secular and the sacred in modernism, examining the desire for spiritual transcendence through journeying that haunts much modernist fiction. By considering such tropes as tourism, pilgrimage, quest, expatriatism, and exile, I investigate the narrative and social models that fictional travellers negotiate during their journeys. My approach is transnational: taking into account both the centre and the periphery of the British Empire, I argue that modernist travel fiction frequently subverts the ideological structures of imperialist cultural relations. Instead of privileging either the imperialistic or metaphorical aspects of modern travel, this thesis carries out the important work of integrating key questions of spirituality into a material analysis of space and place. It thus allows fresh insight into the modernists' radical reformulation of the notion of identity within an ever-expanding geographical and social sphere.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3642.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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