Many modernist innovators of English fiction during the first half of the twentieth century had personal experience of European colonialism and a significant artistic interest in it. Does their encounter with colonialism, as historical cause, biographical incitement, or literary subject matter, contribute to modernist fiction's unsettling of Victorian values and realist idioms? Does the experimental character of modernist fiction reach its revisionary potential as it assimilates colonial plots and settings, nonwestern cultural objects, and symbols harvested from anthropological research or primitivist myth?

There are two ways to answer these questions. The first way sees in literary modernism an implicit opposition to imperialism. Benita Parry argues that modernist style disrupts the “moral confidence” of western imperialism; Edward Said suggests that modernism's “pervasive irony” undermines the triumphalism of imperialism's agents, the European bourgeoisie. The alternative answer argues that modernism's aesthetic hallmarks, including what Elleke Boehmer calls “multivoicedness,” can be understood as stylistic correlates to imperialism. Raymond Williams's concept of “metropolitan perception,” representing a key formulation of this second premise, assigns characteristic forms of modernist thought and expression to the cultural privilege of artists working in western imperial centers.