Commonwealth Of Letters

Commonwealth of Letters examines midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s-such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender-come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers-including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original and extensive archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, T.S. Eliot's notion of impersonality could help recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black, colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did not last forever, but as Commonwealth of Letters shows, it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial literature.

The writing of letters often evokes associations of a single author and a single addressee, who share in the exchange of intimate thoughts across distances of space and time. This model underwrites such iconic notions as the letter representing an 'image of the soul of the author' or constituting 'one half of a dialogue'. However justified this conception of letter-writing may be in particular instances, it tends to marginalize a range of issues that were central to epistolary communication in the ancient world and have yet to receive sustained and systematic investigation. In particular, it overlooks the fact that letters frequently presuppose and were designed to reinforce communities-or, indeed, to constitute them in the first place. This volume explores the interrelation of letters and communities in the ancient world, examining how epistolary communication aided in the construction and cultivation of group-identities and communities, whether social, political, religious, ethnic, or philosophical. A theoretically informed Introduction establishes the interface of epistolary discourse and group formation as a vital but hitherto neglected area of research, and is followed by thirteen case studies offering multi-disciplinary perspectives from four key cultural configurations: Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity. The first part opens the volume with two chapters on the theory and practice of epistolary communication that focus on ancient epistolary theory and the unavoidable presence of a letter-carrier who introduces a communal aspect into any correspondence, while the second comprises five chapters that explore configurations of power and epistolary communication in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic age. Five chapters on letters and communities in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity follow in the third, part before the volume concludes with an envoi examining the trans-historical, or indeed timeless, philosophical community Seneca the Younger construes in his Letters to Lucilius.

Appropriation acts before 1911 published in the Laws of the General Assembly; 1911- in a separate volume.