Making the heart of the world: Internationalism and Anglo-American modernism, 1919--1941

"Making the Heart of the World" reassesses the relationship of Anglo-American prose experimentation to interwar discourses of global community. Between the first and second World Wars, "internationalism" denoted a variety of efforts to cultivate political solidarities which could transcend the nation-state while drawing on the cultural and civic loyalties it still commanded. Literary modernism's responses to this expansive process have often been obscured by a critical tendency to align internationalism with realistic, largely proletarian art forms while diagnosing modernist preoccupations with "the world" as symptoms of aestheticized cosmopolitan mobility or complicity with empire. This dissertation contributes to the scholarly revision of this long-standing assessment; it argues that an internationalist strain of Anglo-American modernist writing sought to fashion persuasive narratives of how global solidarity and national history might cooperate in recovering the nation for a progressive aesthetic of political collectivity.; Chapters One and Two explore how the Americans John Dos Passos and George Schuyler, long understood as apostates from the Left, employ the seemingly disparate genres of travel narrative, modernist novel, and newspaper serial to promote a US internationalism reflective of their anti-colonialism and their distrust of socialist solidarity and national pluralism. These chapters examine these authors' writings about the post-WWI Middle East and the Italo-Ethiopian War. Chapters Three and Four examine British modernism of the 1930s; they analyze the spy novels of Eric Ambler, the Sino-Japanese War writings of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and books by H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf, and argue that internationalism serves for these writers as a way of confronting British imperial decline with new conceptions of national identity. By attending to internationalism's status as a political discourse that is also a mode of cultural and ethical work, I show that current debates about cosmopolitanism, globalization, and the politics of modernism inherit a powerful, underexamined set of concerns from interwar literature's engagements with emerging forms of collectivity.