Modernism and Mobility (The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience)

Modernism and Mobility pursues a literary and historical paradox: cosmopolitanism and international travel characterize modernism, and yet the years between the two world wars were marked by strengthening technologies of mobility control. Using the rise of the passport to telescope the changing constitution of mobile national identity, Bridget Chalk argues that the cosmopolitan and transnational experience of the modernist period was fundamentally structured by the definition, categorization and management of nationality. In so doing, Chalk delineates a crucial relationship between narrative as a governmental and social mode of understanding and literary narrative experimentation. The writers examined range from colonial immigrants (Claude McKay, Jean Rhys) to privileged expatriates (Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford) and disgruntled citizens (D.H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood), whose works reconfigure linear progressive narrative to provide challenging and alternative modes of representing individual and national identity.