The Ends of Empire: Institutional Character and Modernist Realism

“The Ends of Empire” examines a critically neglected relationship between the concept of the institution and the construction of character in the modern Anglophone novel. Contrary to histories of modernism that see it as a literature of interior states, this dissertation argues that key novelists refocused their art on the rapidly expanding totality of the late British Empire’s institutions, which they render as both anonymous collective actors in themselves and as contexts for the actions of individuals. Faced with the exhaustion of the bildungsroman conventions that framed narratives of social inclusion in the nineteenth century, along with an expansion of the contexts for individual development from the nation to the global empire, authors began to define character not only as the unique identity or interesting consciousness, but also as a collection of institutionally shared habits, values, attitudes, and gestures. The dissonant political and aesthetic positions of these writers thus converge on a set of formal developments that I term “institutional character,” in texts that seek to embody the real but incorporeal authority of universities, corporations, law courts, unions, government bureaucracies, the press, the peerage, and the military. In chapters on Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Mulk Raj Anand, and Elizabeth Bowen, I present a narrative of modernist literary history that traces how modern writers sustained, through the representation of institutions, the realist ambition to capture social totality. This history seeks to complement, and to some extent to correct, recent literary-critical work that focuses on state power, a concept that is not always sufficient to the aesthetic effects of social organization in novels of late empire, in which public and private institutions emerge as actors in a worldwide system