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, each tracking a distinct form of spatial disturbance. The first, Insufficiency, turns to late imperial Ireland, where setting falters at the level of language: in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, the Irish landscape resists stable naming and description grows evasive. The second, Disorientation, moves to revolutionary Russia, where the crisis deepens from referential instability to a wholesale breakdown of spatial coherence. Pairing Viktor Shklovsky's early formalist theory and his revolutionary memoir with Isaac Babel's fractured war prose, this movement shows how spatial experience becomes fragmentary and impossible to map from any consistent vantage point. The third, Longing, follows texts written in the shadow of collapse — Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit and the Anglo-Indian fiction of Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao — where setting is haunted by absence, repetition, and elegiac return. Together, these chapters chart a progressive destabilization of narrative space, from the erosion of linguistic clarity to environments defined by what is no longer there.

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.