Colonial Odysseys

[Dave Monroe]

Adams, David.  Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in
   the Modernist Novel.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003.

Works such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and
Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, E. M.
Forster’s A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A
Handful of Dust explore the relationship between
Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was
at its height. David Adams observes that, because of
their structure and specific literary allusions, they
also demand to be read in relation to the epic
tradition. The elegantly written and powerfully argued
Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in
English between 1890 and 1940 in which protagonists
journey from the familiar world of Europe to alien
colonial worlds. 

The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams
discovers, are often less political or literary than
metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major
character dies as a result of the journey, inviting
reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly,
imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies
produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an
odyssey, with death as the home port. Expanding
postcolonial and Marxist theories by drawing on the
philosophy of Hans Blumenberg, Adams finds in this
preoccupation with mortality a symptom of the failure
of secular culture to give meaning to death. This
concern, in his view, shapes the ways modernist
narratives reinforce or critique imperial culture—the
authors project onto British imperial experience their
anxieties about the individual’s relation to the
absolute. 


http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_catalog.taf?_function=detail&Title_ID=4014

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