Works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. David Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition. The elegantly written and powerfully argued Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in English between 1890 and 1940 in which protagonists journey from the familiar world of Europe to alien colonial worlds. The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams discovers, are often less political or literary than metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major character dies as a result of the journey, inviting reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly, imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an odyssey, with death as the home port.
Expanding postcolonial and Marxist theories by drawing on the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg, Adams finds in this preoccupation with mortality a symptom of the failure of secular culture to give meaning to death. This concern, in his view, shapes the ways modernist narratives reinforce or critique imperial culture-the authors project onto British imperial experience their anxieties about the individual's relation to the absolute.
Industry Reviews
"Colonial Odysseys makes a genuine and welcome contribution to the study of modernism and colonial history."-Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History "Adams, of course, is not unique in recognizing a sense of weariness and despair in Nostromo, but his explanation for it is, and so is his discussion of Conrad's philosophy in relation to that of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and even Slavoj Zizek."-Thomas Henthorne, Twentieth-Century Literature "Adams provides a good account of how such modernist fiction differs from popular Victorian novels of empire, which lack a similar tension between realism and symbolism. Though thematic concerns predominate. Conrad's language receives considerable attention, as do Woolf's travels to Greece and study of its ancient language... Besides critics and scholars of literature, philosophers, and theologians will find this study rewarding... Recommended."-Choice "Adam's book is particularly ambitious because it effectively fuses two projects: in addition to an analysis of the British modernists' representations of colonial exploration, it also places these same fictions ... within the tradition of the classical epic journey... Adam's dual focus, which keeps in its sights both the classical literary tradition and the global political scene, does not in the least blur his vision, but indeed allows him to look beyond familiar assessments of both travel writing's cultural function and of modernism's Greco-Roman turn."-Jonathan Greenburg, Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature "Colonial Odysseys strikes a fresh chord in colonial discourse studies by frankly engaging the theological dimensions of modernist fictions set in the colonial world. In a sense, Adams outflanks the mainstream of postcolonial studies, now consolidated into a set of closely historicist, materialist, and post-post-structuralist projects, by returning to the idea of a massive, structuring lack in modern European thought... Adam's readings are so effective at promoting the value of Blumenberg's work to modernist studies that they produce a side effect of reminding us that the problem of spiritual depletion stretches far and wide beyond the contours of a small set of colonial odysseys, beyond fiction to poetry, beyond modernism to romanticism, and so on. In a sense then, we can take Colonial Odysseys as the starting point for a revived conversation among literary historians about the stunning variety of aesthetic wholes that attempt to fill the god-shaped hole in modernity."-Jed Esty, Modernism/modernity "Colonial Odysseys is a pleasure to read. In examining the novels of such authors as Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, David Adams builds a complex, original, and persuasive argument about the modern reappropriation of the odyssey myth to project the West's metaphysical anxieties onto the Empire. The research behind the argument is impressive and sound."-Paul B. Armstrong, Dean of the College, Brown University "David Adams tests fiction with theory and theory with fiction, all the while placing his discussion of modernist anxieties in significant historical and political contexts. The persistence of metaphysical questions in an era so profoundly mistrustful of metaphysical answers is one of the most fruitful ironies Adams explores in his book. Hans Blumenberg's anthropological perspective and concept of 'reoccupation' allow Adams to trace cultural continuities where other critics have found radical breaks."-Karen Lawrence, author of Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition "Colonial Odysseys asks the right questions and tackles them with memorable clarity, originality, and insight. David Adams's precise and engaging prose does perfect justice to his meditation on complex ideas with an argument that is brilliantly conceptualized and solidly executed."-Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University, author of Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era
