Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Germanism, the modern and ‘England’ – 1880–1930: a literary overview
- 2 ‘All these fellows are ourselves’: Ford Madox Ford, race and Europe
- 3 ‘’Tis optophone which ontophanes': race, the modern and Irish revivalism
- 4 Generating modernism and New Criticism from antisemitism: Laura Riding and Robert Graves read T. S. Eliot's early poetry
- 5 Race, modernism and the question of late style in Kipling's racial narratives
- 6 Atlantic modernism at the crossing: the migrant labours of Hurston, McKay and the diasporic text
- 7 Claude McKay in Britain: race, sexuality and poetry
- 8 Wyndham Lewis and the modernists: internationalism and race
- 9 ‘Until Hanandhunigan's extermination’: Joyce, China and racialised world histories
- 10 Race, gender and the Holocaust: traumatic modernity, traumatic modernism
- Index
- References
9 - ‘Until Hanandhunigan's extermination’: Joyce, China and racialised world histories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Germanism, the modern and ‘England’ – 1880–1930: a literary overview
- 2 ‘All these fellows are ourselves’: Ford Madox Ford, race and Europe
- 3 ‘’Tis optophone which ontophanes': race, the modern and Irish revivalism
- 4 Generating modernism and New Criticism from antisemitism: Laura Riding and Robert Graves read T. S. Eliot's early poetry
- 5 Race, modernism and the question of late style in Kipling's racial narratives
- 6 Atlantic modernism at the crossing: the migrant labours of Hurston, McKay and the diasporic text
- 7 Claude McKay in Britain: race, sexuality and poetry
- 8 Wyndham Lewis and the modernists: internationalism and race
- 9 ‘Until Hanandhunigan's extermination’: Joyce, China and racialised world histories
- 10 Race, gender and the Holocaust: traumatic modernity, traumatic modernism
- Index
- References
Summary
By the end of 1922, seeing his banned ‘epic of two races (Israel-Ireland)’ stirring up the cultural intelligentsia of Europe and America, James Joyce had developed enough confidence – or hubris – to turn to the narrative of a larger subject: the human race. To Harriet Shaw Weaver, his patron, he declared that he would now be writing a ‘universal history’. Joyce, I suggest, had been prompted to this by a trend for producing large-scale histories which had already swept up many publishers and writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, John Buchan, Oswald Spengler and, pre-eminently, H. G. Wells. Events – the apparent end of the First World War, recognised as the first world-wide war, the establishment of the League of Nations and the multiple signatories of the Treaties of Versailles and of Sèvres – had led to a new global imaginary which required new global narratives. By 1924 – which seems to be a peak year – dozens of titles alluding to world history were available. As it was put in 1919 by Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) who, as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1905 to 1907, might well have appeared on Joyce's radar:
For the first time in the annals of our planet its inhabitants have become one whole, a community each and every part of which is affected by the fortunes of every other part … Thus comes it that now for the first time the History of the World in the full sense of the word can begin to be written.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and Race , pp. 173 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011