British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Ethnographic Modernism from Wells to Woolf

Product Description

This book reveals that British modernists read widely in anthropology and ethnography, sometimes conducted their own 'fieldwork', and thematized the challenges of cultural encounters in their fiction, letters, and essays.

Review

"An engaging, intelligent, and well-written study that seeks to enrich our understanding of [a] significant strand of British modernist fiction by placing it in dialogue with the concurrently-emerging practice of fieldwork ethnography." - James Buzard, Professor and Head, Literature Faculty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"Snyder s British Fiction and Cross-Cultural Encounters is a coherent, complex, and persuasive interpretation of the ethnographic aspects of a half-century of British fiction, from the late Victorian period to the mid-modernist period.Snyder not only incisively makes the case that the authors here treated-Haggard, Kingsley, Wells, Conrad, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, and Huxley-were exposed to and influenced by then-contemporary ethnography, but that they infused both ethnographic concerns and methods into their fiction. This is a formidable and convincing work." Marc Manganaro, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English, Gonzaga University

About the Author

Carey J. Snyder is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University.