ABSTRACT
This final chapter compares well-known British modernist or modernist-sympathetic texts, particularly by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis, to some of the mid-period work of the Kyoto School, particularly Nishitani Keiji’s Sekaikan to Kokkakan (World-View and State-View) and the first Chūō Kōron symposium in 1941. Specifically, it suggests that this Kyoto moment addresses a British stress on absolute continuity – which British modernism had often tamely accepted as tradition, and which reinforces rather than critiques universalist historiography (though an exception is to be found in a simultaneous Scottish modernism standing against the mainstream of Eliot and Leavis, and closing the long British adjustment). Finally, this chapter asks why this attempt to overhaul the British empire’s universalism, a modernist, pluralist, and ‘postcolonial’ attempt in some sense, has so rarely been taken seriously either in modernist studies or in wider Anglosphere critical thinking.
