Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture. The book's second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the...

Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship.

This study nimbly...