The Passage of Literature

Reviews / Votes

The Passage of Literature broadens our understanding of literary modernism, literary antecedents, and often-overlooked connections. In exploring the ''passage'' of literature, the work also offers a reading of history, even as it reminds us of how the literary and linguistic enterprises are intimately connected with contending histories, politics, and genealogies. In so doing, GoGwilt's study offers fresh insights into the historical, literary, and linguistic understandings of modernism(s) and of modernity. * Veronica M. Gregg, Modern Philology * Reading three diverse modernisms-English, Creole, and Indonesian-in close conversation with one another, Christopher GoGwilt confronts the limits of predominantly Anglophone approaches to modernism. In the process, he redefines key concepts in postcolonial and modernist studies, productively extends recent debates concerning world literature, and offers a model for reconfiguring temporal and geographical relationships in global modernist studies. * Mary Lou Emery, author of Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature * This is an illuminating comparative study of different genealogies of the modernist novel across continents and periods in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The book's chapters on Pramoedya Ananta Toer's fascinating body of work add a genuinely non-Anglophone transnational dimension to the study of literary modernism, particularly in their provocative call for a theoretically informed postcolonial philology. * Pheng Cheah, author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation * A brilliant comparative study of the interrelated genealogies of English, Creole, and Indonesian modernisms...GoGwilt reinvigorates postcolonial studies by returning it to close textual analysis. His valuable book will surely generate much research. Highly recommended. * Choice * GoGwilt's practice of postcolonial philology offers modernist studies a rich theoretical approach through which to intimately connect, rather than merely multiply, transnational modernist movements. More importantly, he demonstrates how such readings can do ample justice to the historical and material interrelations of these modernisms. * Modern Fiction Studies *