With special attention to James Joyce, this chapter offers a brief overview of Irish literary production during a period of domestic cultural revivalism, international turbulence, and nationalist political assertion extending from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War. Topics covered include Irish political writing and social movements in this era, the different ways in which writers conceived of the Irish situation and British imperialism, modernism and revivalism, and the reception of Irish political and literary writings internationally and in the colonial world more particularly. Writers engaged include George Moore (1852–1933), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), G. B. Shaw (1856–1950), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), J. M. Synge (1871–1909), Sean O’Casey (1880–1964), James Joyce (1882–1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989). The study also sketches in brief outline some of the different ways in which Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature frameworks have conceived of Irish literary production in this period.

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

This chapter examines Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys (2018) and, more briefly, Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian (2019). It argues that each of these novels offers a reassessment of the First World War in Mesopotamia (contemporary Iraq) and Palestine, and its ongoing repercussions in the region. This chapter argues that these books should be read as resistant forms of cultural production, which assert the humanity of populations that were often reduced to racialized types or caricature in First World War representations of them. In contrast, these authors draw attention to the imperial roots of contemporary conflict in the Middle East; to the rich cultures, histories, and traditions of its people; and to the impact of violence on ordinary Arab lives, especially those of women and children. As such, they not only offer a new perspective on the First World War, but also challenge the perverse logic of twenty-first-century conflicts in which the deaths of Iraqi and Palestinian civilians continue to be seen as acceptable “collateral damage.”

Traditionally, scholars have focused on how narratives of the lives of the enslaved, commonly understood as “slave narratives,” engaged with explicit claims to authenticity and authority as distinct from those of the novel genre that developed coterminously. Indeed, scholars of the slave narrative have frequently focused almost exclusively on the discursive foundations and frameworks of abolitionism. To solely focus on whether or not a narrative is “true or authentic” is to accept that narratives of the lives of the enslaved can only ever be political ethnography, as opposed to aesthetics. However, like others, enslaved and free Black narrators drew heavily upon engagements with notions of subjectivity and social action that appeared in other genres such as poetry and the novel. And so, consequently, rather than understanding the slave narrative as a genre that is focused solely on the institution of enslavement, we have instead a complex genre that is in dynamic conversation with other institutions, concepts, discourses, and genres. In addition to acknowledging how subaltern groups appropriated other forms of discourse, this chapter will examine how these inherently hybrid and complex texts participated directly and dynamically within discussions of identity, nation, and empire, as well as slavery.

This chapter traces the roots of racial capitalism in early modern England. It shows how ideologies of class and race were grounded in the logic of both nationalism and overseas trade and colonialism. It does so by tracing the evolution of the story of Dick Whittington, a fantasy about a poor boy that acquired the status of a fairy tale in English culture. This evolution illustrates how dreams of class mobility at home were shaped by the promises of international wealth; how these promises in turn molded the ideology of nationalism whereby the nobility and the mercantile classes came together despite the tensions between them; how existing geographic differences were rewritten to present European superiority; and finally, how peoples from different parts of the world were represented as both necessary and dangerous to the advancement of the European self.

While many Black Caribbean British writers persisted in operating within the literary framework of the empire, they blended an African Caribbean style and a Black diaspora perspective to enhance their literary activism. Developing a distinct style, later-generation writers asserted their presence in British society. Their thematic concerns went beyond the struggle for belonging or the need to establish a new Caribbean identity in a foreign environment. Further, as exemplified by poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, their works reflected a thread of resistance against British cultural imperialism and institutionalized racism. Although identity and self-determination continued to resonate deeply within the literature of Black Caribbean British writers, a shift occurred in the newer generation. Departing from biographical narratives, they explored diverse political and social themes while using a range of genre fiction to convey emerging complexities. The first part of the chapter critically analyses the legacies and continuities of the African Caribbean writing style. The second section examines the Black diaspora sensibility, showing how post-1990s Black Caribbean British writers engaged in critical analysis of the intricate intersections of race, gender issues, and sexuality through contemporary literary styles.

This chapter looks at the connection between travel and narrative fiction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It shows how writers of novels borrowed from, expanded on, and reimagined accounts of actual voyages and descriptions of faraway places. Authors such as Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift took details and ideas from travelers such as William Dampier, Woodes Rogers, and James Cooke. Well-known novels, including Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), reflected on and reconsidered England’s relationship to the wider world beyond Europe and the creation of the British Empire – at times critically, at times enthusiastically. The purpose of travelers, for the most part, was to say what they saw and did. It was the prerogative of writers of fiction to digest these facts and reflect on what they meant.

While early twentieth-century Western European and North American modernism has been characterized as a shock, its reverberations pulled the effects of the past variously in the wake of the new, depending on one’s circumstances in global modernity. This chapter discusses how, in that rupture/transition, the passages of Elizabeth Bowen, Pauline Smith, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys into and out of British imperial metropole London in the “Mother Country” (England), reveal their self-conscious adaptations of modernist technologies, undoing some imperial trappings and redoing prevailing imperial-patriarchal structures of value and status to which they claim membership. Each woman conveys the effects of empire–democracy, while struggling to retain belief in the liberal humanist subject/author captured in the figure of the “New Woman.” “Technology” refers to both the material infrastructure of modernity (mass reproduction, invention, and innovation) as well as “teks,” the fabric woven to convey the intangible but felt experiences of being in empire. The chapter unpacks the different implications of the gendered, racialized, and classed discourses of modernity in the nation-state – mastering, producing, doing – for these writers, who were positioned unequally to each other and who interpreted socialist, feminist, and anticolonialist movements differentially.

At the turn of the twentieth century in Britain, genres such as the imperial romance framed by a white, masculine gaze expressed an imperial confidence that dovetailed with the jingoistic adventurism of high empire. But as interimperial rivalries intensified and anti-imperialist movements gained momentum, the romance’s generic and formal features were unsettled by a range of modernist techniques. While this is often recognized in stories by writers such as Conrad and Kipling, this chapter traces the modernist compressions and anti-imperial connections that run through the adventure fiction of two very different authors writing between 1900 and 1945: John Buchan, an arch-imperialist and politician whose romances and spy thrillers are warped by the threat of emerging interimperial rivalries; and Edward John Thompson, a friend of Gandhi and translator of Tagore whose Indian novels combine the generic residues of the romance with the growing presence of anti-imperial insurgencies. Drawing out these formal compressions with reference to modernist writers such as E. M. Forster, the chapter shows how adventure fictions unraveled through the empire’s final decades.

Many critics today rightly call for “decolonizing” utopia given its undeniable deployment in imperialist as well as liberatory projects. It is more historically accurate to view Thomas More’s Utopia, however, as a site of struggle, especially given the contradiction of considering a society without any conception of private property to be “colonialist” at all. At the very least, we should acknowledge Utopia’s negative form, and the problems that its so-called colonialism is attempting to address before too hastily denouncing utopia as inherently colonialist. Utopia, I argue, is always a site of struggle, a reminder of the difficulty of imagining liberation in a “wrong” world. Early receptions of Utopia in England reveal that it was not embraced by advocates of colonial and propertarian projects; not only was it viewed as an impediment to the unfolding of such agendas while the primitive accumulation of capital was underway, but, revealingly, the values and lifeways of More’s Utopians were often associated with the very peoples being colonized and enslaved, not their colonizers. Failing to understand utopia dialectically, then, not only gives rise to presentist misunderstandings of the past, but problematically limits how it can best be understood to work today.

Justin Reynolds narrates how Christians argued for religious freedom in rights terms at a moment of transatlantic hegemony in the 1940s, divorcing protection for religious practice from that for religious belief. That required abandonment of older models of Christian politics, but the results have been fateful for the regulation since of non-Christians around the world.

From agents and bearers of human rights, the volume turns to domains which some have seen as impervious to claimants of rights, but which have been refashioned thanks to their mobilization. Sara Silverstein explains how it was from the periphery – first small European states before World War II and later from the Global South after – that most work was done to elaborate entitlements to healthcare, whether at the local, national, or international level. Some of these impulses sprang from mechanisms of colonial rule, others from the biopolitical transformation of citizenship (including in the rise of mandatory insurance); and there is no doubt that the international standard-setting of the World Health Organization and other agencies played an important role.