Book Description
In this book, one of modernisms most insightful critics, Jane Marcus, examines the writings of novelists such as Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Mulk Raj Anand, and Djuna Barnesartists whose work coincided with the end of empire and the rise of fascism before the Second World War. All these writers delved into the "dark hearts" of imperialism and totalitarianism, thus tackling some of the most complex cultural issues of the day. Marcus investigates previously unrecognized ways in which social and political tensions are embodied by their works. The centerpiece of the book is Marcuss dialogue with one of her best-known essays, "Britannia Rules The Waves." In that piece, she argues that The Waves makes a strong anti-imperialist statement. Although many already support that argument, she now goes further in order to question the moral value of such a buried critique on Woolfs part. In "A Very Fine Negress" she analyzes the painful subject of Virginia Woolfs racism in A Room of Ones Own. Other chapters traverse the connected issues of modernism, race, and imperialism. In two of them, we follow Nancy Cunard through the making of the Negro anthology and her appearance in a popular novel of the freewheeling Jazz Age. Elsewhere, Marcus delivers a complex analysis of A Passage to India, in a reading that interrogates E. M. Forsters displacement of his fear of white Englishwomen struggling for the vote. Marcus, as always, brings considerable gifts as both researcher and writer to this collection of new and reprinted essays, a combination resulting in a powerful interpretation of many of modernisms most cherished figures.
About the Author
Jane Marcus is Distinguished Professor of English at CUNY-Graduate Center and City College of New York. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy; Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman; The Young Rebecca West; and other works.
Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race SYNOPSIS
Marcus (English, CUNY-Graduate Center and City College of New York) explores race, gender, and reading in Europe during the 1920s and 30s--a period coinciding with the end of empire and the rise of fascism. The author analyzes the work of such novelists as Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Mulk Raj Anand, and Djuna Barnes, and their treatment of cultural issues of their time--particularly imperialism and totalitarianism--in an effort to "relocate the heart of darkness in London and Paris, away from those light-filled lands of Africa and India where it has lodged in the Western imagination." Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR