In the years following World War I, the “international” emerged as a distinct scale of political and cultural focus. Internationalisms proliferated in kind as writers and thinkers sought to imagine modes of cooperation that would balance transnational solidarities with national sovereignty. While so-called political realists across the twentieth century have regarded such attempts as wishful thinking, Aarthi Vadde argues that the negotiation of wishing and thinking is at the very heart of internationalism. In Chimeras of Form, she shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe.

Major writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire. Vadde lucidly explains how their formal experiments with the novel, short story, poetry, and political essay contribute to and sometimes even anticipate debates in postcolonial theory and cosmopolitanism. She reads Joyce’s use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the “plotless” works of McKay and Lamming upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of twenty-first-century writers Smith and Shailja Patel shows how ongoing conflicts around migration, displacement, and global economic inequality link modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an ambition, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

"A significant—and elegantly written—work of literary criticism that, true to form, chimerically yokes together otherwise disparate bodies of scholarship into new and exciting combinations." - ASAP/Journal

"A deft intervention into the expansion of modernist internationalism beyond its conventional Euro-American trajectories." - Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry

"A beautifully theorized and persuasive first book that emphatically embraces the critical conversations around global modernism." - Contemporary Literature

"Chimeras of Form is a sophisticated work of scholarship that explicitly engages with topics that should be of interest to scholars of Joyce and modernism more broadly, both pre-World War II modernism as well as after, for those willing to open modernism’s boundaries to the contemporary literature Vadde examines. At its best, Chimeras of Form offers a pathway to bringing literature and literary study to bear on some of the most pressing problems of our time—a lofty and worthy goal." - James Joyce Quarterly

"Both broad and deep, critically synthetic and analytically precise...Vadde’s book has given us a valuable index of how literary-historical terms such as modernism,when stretched, unsettled, and grafted, can themselves make history for the future." - Novel: A Forum for Fiction

"Required reading for anyone interested in developing novel methods for understanding the reach of the global as a distinctively modernist formal and political project." - The Year's Work in English Studies