Cosmopolitan style: English modernisms, international cultures, and the twentieth-century novel

Cosmopolitan Style: English Modernisms, International Cultures, and the Twentieth-Century Novel argues that cosmopolitan fiction in the twentieth century is particularized by its many national attachments and that recent formulations of cosmopolitanism in philosophy and literary criticism have undervalued this promiscuity. The writers considered in this project assemble elements from different national cultures in the pages of their fiction and also assert that international encounters, including those of fiction, create new cultures at home. Cosmopolitanism today is sometimes proposed as worldwide allegiance, modeled after Kantian universalism, and sometimes attacked as unsettled transience, whose inconsistent affiliations demonstrate political quietude or individual privilege. Cosmopolitan Style describes the vernacular idioms of cosmopolitan fiction and redefines the terms used against cosmopolitanism, today and throughout the twentieth century, as styles of local commitment.; Each of the chapters takes up one of these styles as it is developed in the work of a twentieth-century novelist whose own national attachments are partial, if not multiple. The dissertation attends to Henry James's "infidelity," Joseph Conrad's "choice," Virginia Woolf's "camouflage," Salman Rushdie's "flirtation," and Kazuo Ishiguro's "treason." The reclaiming of disparaged words and practices is crucial to the argument of this study within the context of contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and international culture, and it is also crucial to the literary and cultural protocols of cosmopolitan writing, which seeks to transform bad habits---whether social diffidence or racist stereotypes---by adopting them inappropriately. The indecorous internationalism of contemporary fiction, for example, in which national cultures are represented by popular artifacts such as "The Beatles" or "The Lone Ranger," extends and recasts the improprieties of modernist revision: where Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf fashioned the natural characteristics of English culture as narrative tropes, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro add new idioms to English fiction, integrating media images from radio and television whose international origins and immigrant translations remake English culture for good.