ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

text when she moves to apply her expanded definition of modernism. Friedman holds
up the Sudanese author Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North as an example
of postcolonial modernism that does not merely copy or echo the features of Anglo-
American modernism. Yet, Season of Migration to the North is a sort of re-writing of
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Friedman’s description of both texts’ stylistic
features resembles McHale’s account of modernism:
Even more than Conrad’s novel, Season of Migration to the North is a
narrative of indeterminacy; of mysteries, lies, and truths; of mediating
events through the perspectives of multiple embedded narrators; of
complex tapestries of interlocking motifs and symbols; and of
pervasive irony. Stylistically speaking, Salih’s novel is “high
modernist,” having moved even further than Conrad from the
conventions of realism.” (Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism” 435-
436)
Friedman names Conrad and Salih’s texts as “high modernism,” that is, belonging to
a particular modernism which she argues is not the only modernism. (She does not
offer here a contrasting reading of a text belonging to a different modernism.) What
makes these texts high modernist is the stylistic and thematic dominance of a
catalogue of concerns which could be summed up by McHale’s definition of
modernism: an epistemologically-dominant poetics.
Thus, even in a field of plural modernisms, McHale’s definition remains
useful in describing a particular type of modernism. In addition, McHale’s definition
of modernism is flexible enough that it can be applied to texts outside of its initial
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