In this chapter I reconsider the possible relationship between modernism as aesthetic project and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empire, an immense organizational problem of long-distance state administration. I begin with a more detailed critical backdrop: Louis Menand's and Michael Levenson's modernist genealogical readings of Joseph Conrad's aesthetics in terms of the political economy of empire. In the main section of this chapter, I examine Sara Jeannette Duncan's and Katherine Mansfield's fiction about administering India and colonizing New Zealand as “white settler modernism.” I am not trying to demarcate a subset of modernism by using the category “white settler modernism.” Nor am I trying to argue that simply writing about empire – regardless of style – is modernist. Rather, I document the ways in which Duncan's and Mansfield's work alerts us to a modernist understanding of realist technique derived from an awareness of the narrative elements of state administrative languages. Thus, these works both have a place in and expose the limits of modernist genealogies which do not aim directly to address the issue of empire's entanglements with modernism, yet nonetheless rely on Joseph Conrad's imperial economies.

“Modernism and empire” criticism exposes the conceptual difficulties of simultaneously defining modernism as a historical and as an aesthetic phenomenon. Critical genealogies of modernism and empire intertwine claims about the relations between economic and political phenomena and literary history with an assumption that “modernist narration” is the conversion of content into style.