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Inventing Popular Culture From Folklore to Globalization (review)

353 the Anglican church and becoming a British subject, rediscovered culture as a national category, one rooted in a conception of race but also in a form of grounded temporality. The last chapter translates these concepts of the local, the island, and the nation into economic and sociological terms. In an unexpected but highly suggestive move, Esty argues that Keynes’s General Theory supplies the economic version of national culturalism, just as his theory of a national economics anticipates the nation-bounded welfare state. The cultural version of this new nationalism turns out to be cultural studies. E. P. Thompson’s notion of the British working class and Williams’s epistemology of Englishness thus appear as the critical consequences of imperial retreat. This genealogy of cultural studies may also explain why cultural studies, in both its British and U.S. version, continues to gravitate toward a study of national and local phenomena at a time when comparative or even global circulation and flows have moved to the center of critical attention. The striking re-thinking of late modernism undertaken in this book is made possible, in part, by a suspension of the standard narratives of literary decline. Accordingly, and wisely, the book takes the fantasies of its authors on their own terms even and especially when dealing with the more reactionary forms of this new Anglo-centrism. There is a small price to be paid for this method, namely that it becomes difficult to address the fact that the inward turn and its presumed insular autonomy was, at least in part, a grand illusion. The loss of empire did not lead to cultural, economic, or military isolation, let alone autonomy. The empire continued to write back, World War II was won through the sacrifices of the Red Army and American industrial might, and after the war, NATO, the EU and other international organizations shaped the fate of Great Britain as much as the empire had done before. Esty knows and mentions this, but I would have appreciated a fuller account of the divergence between perceived insular autonomy and actual interdependence. Despite or rather because of its explicitly insular subject matter, however, Esty’s book serves as a convincing paradigm for how to study a national culture in an international context. He does not take the island nation as a default category, but theorizes its parochial nature. A national literature emerges that is not natural, but the product of international forces that are variously fractured and absorbed by a national literature in distress. A Shrinking Island is an innovative and compelling study, written by a sharp and analytical mind, and is bound to leave lasting marks on the study of British modernism.