This book challenges the persistent critical view that modernism is an urban movement, by showing that it is as much a product of the "bush," or ethnographic field, as of the city. It also helps correct the misconception that modernism, with its "inward" focus, was hermetically sealed off from real world concerns, by showing that literary modernists were engaged in a critical dialogue with ethnographic writers of their day, exploring epistemological questions about how one comes to know another culture, and casting doubt on the ethnographic project by emphasizing the obstacles to cross-cultural rapport and understanding.

Ethnographic Observers Observed
Explorer Ethnography and Rider Haggard's Adventure Fiction
Bewilderment as Style and Methodology in the Writings of Mary Kingsley, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad
Self Nativizing in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the Limitations of Ethnographic Rapport and Understanding
D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest  

CAREY J. SNYDER is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University, USA.