Occidental drift: London, modernism, and the politics of form in early West Indian fiction

This dissertation argues that British modernist fiction and early West Indian postcolonial fiction were in many respects convergent and mutually reinforcing aesthetic projects. Studying the social and cultural context of the works of the three most established and visible West Indian novelists of the 1950's---Edgar Mittelholzer, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon---my dissertation illustrates the strategic benefits an affiliation with modernism offered to early West Indian writers. For such writers, I argue, modernist techniques provided not only a mechanism by which they could mark their difference from the aggressively English, literalist aesthetic that dominated postwar London literature (itself emphatically anti-modernist in character), but also a highly complex, self-critical medium through which they could treat themes of nationalism, cultural inheritance, identity, and colonial history. The introductory chapter delineates the sociocultural currents of the postwar London literary scene, and the three following chapters are single-author case studies of the works of Mittelholzer, Lamming, and Selvon which focus on the overtly experimental and self-reflexive aspects of their early novels and their relationship to the politics of form both in the Caribbean and in London. The concluding chapter of the dissertation examines both the work and the critical discussion of Jean Rhys, using the clear technical parallels between her earlier and later work to suggest points of convergence between modernist and postcolonial literary practice. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that these foundational West Indian novelists can be convincingly read (as they were in postwar London) in conversation with modernist practice, a view that can open up insights into the strategic advantages, as well as the limitations, of taking up a literary practice that transgresses generic, racial, social, and national boundaries.