They treat the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a 'modernising' import.
In the four substantive chapters that then follow, the authors explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of their method of comparativism seems to be most dramatically highlighted. In the two theoretical chapters that frame the book, the authors argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system a singular modernity, combined and uneven and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of 'world literature' and 'modernism', on the other, that this book looks for its specific contours. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central - perhaps the central - arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide.
This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of 'world literature', considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. While History 1 enables a totalizing interpretation which allows Gamperaḷiya and Virāgaya to be thought of as embodying a narrative/realist aesthetic and affective/modernist aesthetic respectively, History 2 enables a close scrutiny of specific aspects of aesthetic mediation and play which complicate History 1’s totalizing and often Eurocentric thrust. The method of historicizing that is proposed involves two interpretative levels that follow the contours of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s categories of History 1, or history posited by capital, and History 2, or histories outside the life processes of capital. This question is supplemented by a discussion of the aesthetic modes of two Sinhala novels: Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaḷiya (1944) and Virāgaya (1956). This article addresses the question of how one may historicize aesthetic change, especially in the context of the third-world novel, by conceiving the aesthetic as a historically contingent category that mediates between the singularity of form and the particularity of content.
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