Narratives of utopia inchoate: African fiction and British modernism

This dissertation revises contemporary conceptions of both canonical British Modernism and African fiction, which, in the fifties and early sixties, began to re-work Modernist strategies and insights for its own ends. The starting-place for this revision is a common feature central to the works examined in both contexts: a negation, articulated differently in each work, of the world as it is; a refusal of the actual, which opens up a space of possibility---even in the most dystopic texts---that is simply otherwise, and which these texts are unable ultimately to name or adequately to describe. On one hand, the examination of this dynamic re-opens the question of the politics of Modernism, the understanding of which has tended to harden into the dismissal of the stereotyped hermetic text or the celebration of elements which seem to prefigure contemporary notions of textuality. On the other, this study is also, and simultaneously, a re-opening of the question of the significance of this first wave of African novels, which have too often been understood as primarily "realist" and judged according to their deviations from literal representational justice. Viewed from its relation to canonical Modernism, African fiction's formal dimension regains its centrality as an engine of meaning; meanwhile, from the retrospective view of the African novel, British Modernism's Utopian aspect regains its political complexity.; The opening up of this recurring space in the texts examined occurs along three axes: Subjectivity (James Joyce's Ulysses and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure), History (Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Parade's End, and Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God), and Politics (Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's I Will Marry When I Want). Finally, this space is seen as a symptom of a peculiar historical possibility that resonates between inter-War Europe and Africa in the period of decolonization.