Abstract

Imperialism has been identified as a central and significant element within the field of British modernism.A number of writers foreground imperialism as a prerequisite of modernist production. Edward Said, forexample, writes that all metropolitan politics and art movements were constituted, during the modernistmovement, by their location in the imperialist economy: "Eurocentrism penetrated to the core of theworkers' movement, the women's movement, the avant-garde arts movement, leaving no one ofsignificance untouched." Fredric Jameson's analysis of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf is animatedby an argument that "the structure of imperialism also makes its mark on the inner forms and structuresof that new mutation in literary and artistic language to which the term modernism is loosely applied." Other arguments engage with the ways modernism can be understood as a response to the conditionsof imperialism. Kathy Phillips's Virginia Woolf Against Empire argues, as the title suggests, that Woolfboth specifically castigated imperialism and made complaints against "'Empire' as an inclusive term,encompassing economics, gender relations, and war making, as these forces operate at home andabroad." Bernard Smith's analysis of modernism in the visual arts argues that imperialism had a directeffect on the rejection of naturalism,"manifest in the desire to create a universal art with a European look,a formal art that might be globally negotiable among all the heterogeneous cultures of the world." Gayatri Spivak has famously argued that:"It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century Britishliterature without remembering that imperialism, understood as Britain's social mission, was a crucial partof the cultural representation of England to the English." While this understanding of imperialism wascertainly challenged at the hands of modernism, it is also true that imperialism remained the overarchingcondition of modernist possibility