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Project MUSE - Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development by Jed Esty (review)

muse.jhu.edu · 36 words · saved by 1 readers

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Unseasonable Youth studies the ways in which novelistic subject formation changed, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, as complementary allegories of nation-building and self-making that underlie the Goethean bildungsroman break down. Jed Esty focuses on a pathology many have identified in modernist narrative: arrested adolescence. What he adds to prior descriptions of that pathology is a powerful geographical and historical framework that connects interrupted development to crises in both the European nationstate and its colonial peripheries during the late stages of empire. This framework enables him to demonstrate that many developmental genres—the metropolitan bildungsroman, [End Page 314] autobiographical fiction, colonial novels—dramatize a breakdown of subjective temporality whose roots lie in the disrupted temporalities of global capitalism.

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