Distant Chimeras: John Galsworthy, the Edwardian Novel, and the Contradictions of Internationalism

Abstract

Abstract:John Galsworthy's fiction has been too easily dismissed by (modernist) literary history. His most famous work—The Forsyte Saga—offers a scathing critique of imperial England. Yet, over the course of the trilogy, his satire is gradually overtaken by a sentimental preoccupation with national continuity. His novels are thus marked by an increasing concern with reassuring their own conventional mode of representing the nation. This inconsistency should not be smoothed over, however, for it offers valuable insights into the contradictions of interwar internationalist thinking, in which Galsworthy was a leading voice.