![]() This revolution combined with the Industrial Revolution to transform settlement into something explosive - capable of creating great cities like Chicago and Melbourne and large socio-economies in a single generation. ![]() Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans and mountains, a revolutionary upward shift in attitudes to emigration, the emergence of a settler 'boom mentality', and a late flowering of non-industrial technologies - wind, water, wood, and work animals - especially on settler frontiers. Between 17, the number of English-speakers rocketed from 12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew to match. Why does so much of the world speak English? This book gives a new answer to that question, uncovering a 'Settler Revolution' that took place from the early 19th century that led to the explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin, the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism. ![]() It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form-and on the very meaning of Englishness. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. ![]() The surreal quality of Sainthill’s “antipodean” vision corresponded with increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards Britain’s imperial status, complicating its intended celebration of Britain’s post-war cultural renewal during the significant commemorative event of the Festival of Britain. Sainthill’s early career in the UK was shaped by theatrical-imperial networks intent on strengthening Commonwealth ties, and his fantasy-inflected settler-modernist style transplanted to Britain especially well during a period when the metropolis sought to imagine new post-imperial futures for itself. On closer examination, however, there is evidence that despite his apparently conciliatory approach, Sainthill’s complex visual style expressed the anxieties of Britain’s post-war transition from Empire to Commonwealth. At first glance, the acclaimed designer appears the ultimate cultural insider, a gifted cosmopolitan artist who successfully navigated his way from Tasmania to the summit of the British theatre industry. Calling upon a variety of performance documents, it considers what Sainthill’s work reveals about the hierarchical cultural relationship between Britain and its former colony at the time. This article discusses the Australian artist Loudon Sainthill’s stage and costume designs for Michael Benthall’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production of The Tempest (1951, 1952).
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