Research

Unsettling Empire proceeds from a counterintuitive observation: that the most politically turbulent prose fiction of the early twentieth century is also some of its least distinct. When empire collapses, the world of the novel goes blurry. This book argues that this is not a failure of representation but a formal strategy: as the British Empire contracted in Ireland and India and the Russian Empire gave way to the Soviet federation, writers confronted a world that was immediate and vivid, yet paradoxically difficult to fully apprehend. The result, across three literary traditions, is what the book calls elusive setting — narrative environments marked by vagueness, unstable naming, perspectival slippage, and distortions of scale that register the perceptual strain of living through imperial dissolution.

The book is organized around three movements. Insufficiency turns to late imperial Ireland, where Joyce's Portrait and Bowen's The Last September register the failure of the conceptual categories — "nation," "politics," "Ireland" itself — that would render the landscape politically intelligible. Disorientation moves to revolutionary Russia: Shklovsky's Sentimental Journey approaches the October Revolution as an absence to be circled through digression rather than narrated directly, while Babel's Red Cavalry locates formal innovation at the arrière-garde, where peripheral voices and warped proportions reveal what the vanguard perspective cannot see. Longing turns to environments shaped by what has failed or not yet arrived — the utopian void of Platonov's Foundation Pit and the elegiac repetitions of Ali's and Rao's late colonial fiction. Together, the three movements trace a shifting relation between political transformation and perceptual experience: from the failure of the categories through which space is named, to the collapse of spatial orientation itself, to environments defined by what has receded or not yet come.

By locating historical knowledge in the background of fiction rather than in its events or arguments, Unsettling Empire offers an alternative account of how novels think about political transformation. Against histories of imperial collapse and decolonization that privilege decisive rupture and revolutionary clarity, the writers gathered here suggest that empire's end is experienced as something dimmer and more ambient: pressure without clear object, a strangeness in the texture of space itself. In recovering setting as a central category of modernist aesthetics, the book proposes that the vague, the partial, and the indeterminate are not aesthetic deficiencies but the very forms through which a world in dissolution becomes thinkable.