Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures

This book addresses W. B. Yeats’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s engagements with identity, nationalism, and the literary and cultural traditions of Ireland and India. It offers a fresh critical perspective on their work from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their international collaborations most significantly influence the cross-border lives of their literature. Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures foregrounds the Yeats-Tagore relationship, providing a new analysis of the fraught beginning to Tagore’s international fame and the value of reading his English translations as original texts (as is done by many English-language readers). Exploring the thematic parallels and generic innovations in the works of Yeats and Tagore allows readers to recognize the significant moments of tension and divergence in their oeuvres. Reading Yeats and Tagore comparatively offers a timely historical perspective on how the nationalized valences of identity and selfhood might become transnational in contemporary readings.

“Mohite succeeds in her aim to particularize a mode of reading derived from the study of world literature: the thematic and creative equivalences drawn from a transhistorical perspective secure Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures as a significant intervention in literary discourses on modernism, transnationalism, and world literatures.”
—Jinan Ashraf, The Modernist Review

“Through the interpretation of impacts, influences, and creative reception, Mohite’s book on Yeats and Tagore may become the paradigm in the discussions of the role of literature in the contemporary world.”
—Mina M. Đurić, Review of Irish Studies

“The question of Yeats’s postcolonial credentials (his ‘cosmopolitan nativism’, as Jahan Ramazani has called it) is considered at length, and illuminated by the non-Western framework and a close attention to subaltern modernisms in all their variety… Mohite’s conceptualizing of the transnational as a model for reading these poets has much to teach students of Irish poetry, and this study deserves a wide readership.”
—David Wheatley, Year’s Work in English Studies