Eric Sandberg

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Prestige

Hilary Mantel’s best-selling and prize-winning novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012) are exemplary texts in the recent development of high-culture historical fiction and in the centrality of adaptive processes to cultural production and consumption. They belong to a long-denigrated genre which is inherently adaptive, and which is currently shifting its cultural position from mass popularity towards cultural respectability. This process is central to the novels’ adaptation for stage and screen. In both adaptations, the transmission of cultural prestige between institutions and art forms is a central concern, as is revealed by authorial involvement, the broad cultural framing and institutional reception of the adaptations, and their use of formal techniques as indicators of prestige.

“A Terrible Beauty is Born”: Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, the Spy Thriller and Modern Identity

ABSTRACT Erskine Childers’ 1903 The Riddle of the Sands represents a transition point between the invasion scare novel and the emerging espionage novel. One of its main contributions to the latter is its representation of “normal” people as they are caught up in events of historical significance. The amateur status of its spies, particularly the narrator Carruthers, both preserves them from the opprobrium of dishonest and dishonourable behaviour, and makes them suitable vehicles for the text’s exploration of the ambiguities of modern identity. This ambiguity concerns both personal ethics and national allegiance, and it finds its fullest expression in the novel in the shifting landscapes in which the narrative is set. The Riddle of the Sands can thus be read as an early use of popular fiction forms to examine the complexities of twentieth-century subjectivity in light of changes in historical experience.

Adaptation and Systems of Cultural Value

This introductory chapter examines the intersection of prestige, adaptation, and the formal and informal cultural systems that serve as arbiters of taste and value. It compares the cyclical nature of awards with the slower process of canon formation, emphasizing the role of adapting the canon in the visual turn, the role of authorship on both sides of an adaptation, and the framing of fidelity as a measure of prestige in different cultural contexts. The performative component of cultural esteem is also discussed, both in terms of how performance itself can earn or maintain prestige and how the spectacle of awards culture adds a public, performative dimension to the conferral of prestige.

Modernism in a Global Context

Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz have described the “New Modernist Studies” as an expansion of the field of critical inquiry along spatial, temporal and vertical axes, roughly corresponding to an increase in geographical, chronological and generic reach. Peter Kalliney’s Modernism in a Global Context contributes to the extension of the first of these categories, linking what he describes as modernism’s “aesthetics of motion and dissonance” with the history of the “cultural networks” which helpe shaped its transnational development as a global, rather than a merely European and North American, phenomenon (p. 3). What results is a useful and timely study of “modernism [...] on the move” which offers readers a “critical introduction to the topic of modernism in a global context” (pp. 11, 23). Kalliney begins with a brief discussion of five major recent theorists whose work has helped shape the study, indeed even the concept, of world literature—David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Gayatri Spivak and Paul Gilroy. He then goes on to survey some of the more notable developments in recent modernist studies, including its focus on issues such as race, genre and space. These two introductory stages provide a valuable orientation to the core chapters of the book. Each of these focuses on a key area in the study of global modernism, and offers both an overview of diverse critical approaches and debates, and a series of case studies. These indicate how a comparative approach can open up new vistas towards a fuller understanding of modernism as a transnational phenomenon. The first area Kalliney examines is imperialism and its relationship to global modernism: as he points out, the impact of postcolonial theory on our vision of what (and how) modernism is has been tremendous, both decisively broadening a once Eurocentric understanding of the literary field through a “recalibration of the modernist canon” and offering a much clearer understanding of “the ways in which representations of the responses to imperialism inform modernist culture” (p. 25). After a survey of the development of postcolonial thought from Said to Bhabha, Kalliney offers case studies illuminating “two strains of modernism”: a literature of imperialism which he associates with the 1884–85 Berlin Conference on the European division of Africa, and a literature of anti-colonial solidarity associated with the 1955 Bandung Afro-Asian Conference repudiating European colonialism (p. 39). While as Kalliney admits, there may be little left to say about a writer like Joseph Conrad in this context, his other examples of “Berlin modernism”—Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Bowen and Karel Čapek—and his examples of “Bandung modernism”—Aimé Cesaire, Pramoedya Anata Toer and M. G. Vassanji—are considerably less well known, and thus perhaps more interesting. While Kalliney’s coverage of the relationship between modernism and imperialism is certainly valuable, it is also likely to be relatively familiar to many readers. In the following chapters, however, he deals with topics that have received a less overwhelming (or arguably stultifying) level of attention. His discussion of modernism’s relationship with cosmopolitanism, for instance, explores the fascinating tension between views of this sort of global identity as an antidote to “modern forms of ethnocentrism, nationalism, xenophobia, and misogyny” or, alternatively, as little more than a “recrudescent form of imperialism” (pp. 60, 64). The argument is developed with individual sections on fascinating and important yet not always well-known figures like Nancy Cunard and Eileen Chang. Similarly, Kalliney’s chapter on the ways in which metropolitan cultural institutions—little magazines, independent publishing houses, literary festivals and cultural awards—have been reassessed in light of a new