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"Perpetual Movement, And A Border Of Mystery": The Transatlantic Imagined Community And Henry James' "The Golden Bowl", Nancy Cunard And "Negro: An Anthology", And Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea", Oliver Quimby Melton

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

Many modernist writers attempted to transcend nationality but are ultimately unable to do so because of an unyielding fact of post-eighteenth century existence; namely, that a person possesses a nationality is an unavoidable, requisite donnee of modern life. This dissertation argues that this paradox was effectively resolved in the Atlantic world, an especially active locus of modernist meta-nationality, where a dialogic, unfinalizable transatlantic "nation" or, using Benedict Anderson's term, "imagined community" formed. This study examines three particular writers and works that frame and contribute to the development of this imagined community. First, I argue that the ideal "Anglo-Saxon total" Henry …