CELTIC WORLD-SYSTEM, 1880-1980 by Matthew Eatough
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AFFECTIVE TRANSNATIONALISM: WRITING ANGLO DECLINE IN THE AFRO- CELTIC WORLD-SYSTEM, 1880-1980 By Matthew Eatough Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2012 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Mark Wollaeger Professor Jay Clayton Professor Jonathan Lamb Professor Jed Esty ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation has been the product of endless conversations, collaborations, and debates among friends and colleagues, and so acknowledging these debts is both a vital and necessarily incomplete endeavor. First of all, I have been fortunate enough to be blessed with a committee whose insights, critiques, and questions have guided this project from a series of amorphous ideas about South African literature, Irish literature, and capitalism into its current form. Mark Wollaeger has been everything one could hope for in an advisor, generously sharing his time, enthusiasm, and professional advice in regard to nearly every facet of this project. Jay Clayton has taught me more about writing powerfully than I could even begin to say, and has time and again challenged me to think about the wider ramifications and scholarly contexts for my work. Jonathan Lamb’s penetrating questions about emotion, agency, and aesthetics ensured that the literary component of this project resisted succumbing to its economic-historical narrative. And Jed Esty’s keen eye masterfully anticipated the larger stakes of this project and its future incarnations. Finally, in addition to the members of my committee, Allison Schachter, Rachel Teukolsky, Paul Young, and Jaya Kasibhatla all read and discussed earlier versions of this project and helped guide it toward its present form. This project has been made possible through valuable support from the Vanderbilt College of Arts & Science, in the form of a Summer Research Award and a Dissertation Enhancement Grant; from the Vanderbilt Department of English, in the form of a Robert Manson Myers Dissertation Award and a Martha Ingram Fellowship for the year 2010-2011; from the Robert Penn Warren Center, for a year-long fellowship in 2011-2012; and from the Z. Smith Reynold’s Library at Wake Forest University, in the form of a Provost’s Research Grant. ii Over the course of my years at Vanderbilt, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities has served as an indispensible center for discussion and a generous source of financial support. My thanks to Mona Frederick, Kate Rattner, and Allison Thompson for the consistently high level of programs, seminars, colloquia, and discussion groups that the Warren Center supports each year. The Warren Center Dissertation Fellows Program provided a year of service-free funding to complete this dissertation and a group of intelligent and welcoming scholars with whom to workshop chapters. Each of my fellow fellows – Diana Bellonby, Will Bishop, Matt Duques, Anna-Lisa Halling, Joanna Mazurska, Tara Plunkett, Alison Suen, and Rob Watson – enriched this project through the various perspectives, knowledge, and methodologies that they brought to the group. Special thanks go to my fellow English graduate students, Diana Bellonby and Matt Duques, and to Rob Watson. Diana’s detailed grasp of late- Victorian aesthetics and formalism helped to focalize how modernist aesthetics worked in and through a vocabulary of formalist emotion; Matt provided a much-appreciated interlocutor for postcolonial theory and world-systems theory, both in the Dissertation Fellows Writing Group and as co-coordinator of the Warren Center’s Postcolonial Theory Reading Group; and Rob’s exhaustive knowledge of just about any topic one could image expanded this project in interesting and unforeseen directions. The Twentieth-Century and Postcolonial Theory Reading Groups at the Warren Center also provided hospitable venues for presenting and discussing this project. Thanks first of all go to Megan Minarich, my co-founder and for several years co-coordinator of the Twentieth- Century Reading Group, as well as collaborator in numerous other projects. Megan has been a paragon of professionalism, congenial collaboration, and boundless energy, and without her keen iii sense for blending together scholarship, administrative acumen, and innovative thinking I am not sure where I would be either in terms of this project or my graduate career more generally. I am also grateful for the fruitful discussions that were produced within these groups through the hard work and dedication of fellow graduates students from across the university. The list of colleagues and friends who participated in these groups is too long to name in full, but I would be remiss to not mention some of those whose conversations helped to enrich this project: Michael Alijewicz, Elizabeth Barnett, Kathleen DeGuzman, Andy Hines, Cari Hovanec, Amanda Johnson, Chris Pexa, and Aubrey Porterfield. Of course, no project remains within the narrow confines of workshops, writing groups, and lectures. The conversations I have had with colleagues and friends from other institutions and with fellow Vanderbilt students outside the classroom have often proved as invaluable as have discussions in formal settings. Benny Bahktiarnyia, Ian Baucom, Amy Clukey, James Gifford, Peter Migdeley, Justus Nieland, Peter Kalliney and Susan Stanford Friedman all contributed to this project in one form of another, whether through reading drafts, while debating the intersections of modernism and postcolonialism, or in casual conversation over dinner. At Vanderbilt, Jane Wanninger has provided a welcome connection to southern Wisconsin and an equally welcome insistence that I occasionally think about things outside the realm of academia. Along with Jane, Michael Alijewicz, Beau Baca, Diana Bellonby, RJ Boutelle, Elizabeth Covington, Matt Duques, Stephanie Higgs, Dan Fang, Amanda Johnson, Adam Miller, Megan Minarich, and Rob Watson chatted about literature, culture, and just about every other topic under the sun over dinner, drinks, dancing, and games. If the circuitous paths through which these conversations find their way into any given project prove almost impossible to trace, this says as much about the multifaceted nature of these discussions, the wisdom and erudition of iv these individuals, and the unquantifiable boon of friendship as it does about the indecipherability of influence. Finally, and most importantly, my largest and most heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Bill and Sceone, and to Anna Sporek, for their constant and untiring support. My mother will swear to this day that she set me off on the path to literary studies – for good or for ill – by reading me Nancy Drew mysteries at bedtime, and that she knew I would be a literary scholar when at six years old I lectured her about the parallelism between Phil Connors and Punxsutawney Phil in Groundhog Day; and as childhood myths go, this is a fairly satisfying one. But regardless of the when, where, and how, I will be forever grateful to both of my parents for instilling in me a love for reading and a reverence for knowledge. To Anna, for putting up with the rigors of a life in academia, for insisting that I leave my study for fresh air and human contact, and for never wavering in her belief in me, I can truly say that this project is due as much to her unceasing support as to anything I have done. Anna would undoubtedly point to the charts and timelines contained within as her most direct contribution to this project – the accountant teaching the humanist how to think quantitatively – but her impact can be read in every line of this dissertation, shaping how I think, what I think about, and who I am. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................ ii PREFACE........................................................................................................................ viii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... xxiii Chapter I. AFFECTIVE WORLD-SYSTEMS AND THE ATLANTIC ECONOMY ............1 The Twilight of Settlement: Problems in Literary Historiography..................12 Anglo-South Africans, the Plaasroman, and the Mine Novel...................15 The Anglo-Irish and the Big House Novel ................................................23 Long Waves, Repetitive Histories: Structure and Temporality in the World-System ..................................................................................................31 Anglo Settlement and the Atlantic Semiperiphery ..........................................43 Vanishing Mediators: Transnational Feeling, the Global Economy, and Literature..........................................................................................................52 Formalist Emotion: Literature in the World-System .......................................64 II. FICTIONS OF DEVOLUTION: OLIVE SCHREINER, BERNARD SHAW, AND THE SENTIMENTAL ADMINISTRATION OF EMPIRE........................84 Constitutionalism Between the Anglo-Boer Wars...........................................90 Shaw, the State, and the Rejection of the Politics of Sentiment......................97 The Marginal Recuperation of Sentiment in John Bull’s Other Island.........109 Schreiner’s Sympathetic Constitutionalism...................................................117 Recursive Sentiment and the Administration of Affect