Dislocated Modernities: The Paradox of the Plantation in Twentieth-Century Irish and American Fiction

Decades of literary criticism assessing twentieth-century plantation literature would no doubt see this treatment of Irish and American big houses under the aegis of modernist experimentation as a rank contradiction in terms. The authors considered in this project have long been represented across conceptual forms as conservative, regionally-distinctive agrarian elites, deemed “backward” by the asymmetrically-developing states of the interwar era. Dislocated Modernities assembles a transatlantic archive concerning the anachronistic plantation complex to pursue two primary and interlocking aims: first, to dissect the critical feminization of big house literature, and then to foreground comparison of these traditions to unlock questions of disciplinary periodization and of postlapsarian modernism.

Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty, and Molly Keane have seldom been considered as writers invested in transforming planter fiction from within and on their own terms; each author struggled with vitriolic reviews and discouragement from publication when her handling of big house culture did not accord with rhetoric defining a masculinist literary renaissance. In part, this study begins with the early 1930s to recapture the volatility of Irish and American critical reception around plantation fiction. The novels and short stories I discuss have been understood to extend what Joe Cleary describes as an inherently romanticized, conservative ideology perpetuating a “rueful emphasis on the grace of a lost civilization.” This project resists the truism that plantation fiction wields social power only through narrating its own demise. Instead, I analyze the ways such texts afford a nexus wherein the mostly-unexamined nationalisms of Anglo-Irish and Southern writers are mapped onto their stories about modernity and belonging from the vantage of modernism’s ostensible end.