Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern

Download or read book Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern written by C. J. Wan-ling Wee and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern explores the problematic formation of national culture within modern English society. In this ambitious work of post-colonial and cultural theory, C. J. Wan-ling Wee investigates the complex interaction between a modern, industrialized, metropolitan, and progressively rational English national culture and a nationalistic imperial discourse interested in territorial expansion and the valorization of an idealized agrarian past. Starting with the Victorian era, the work documents the complex relationship of concepts such as 'home' and 'frontier' and 'EnglishO and 'colonial' through an analysis of key literary-cultural figures in their historical contexts: Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, T.S. Eliot, and V.S. Naipaul. Wee brings the discussion of modernity into the present with a consideration of post-imperial Singapore--a neo-traditionalist modern society that reworks many of the colonial tropes and contradictions--to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions revealed in the West's engagement with modernity.