There is, Peppis points out, a sense of Englishness that is represented by the establishment, and is that sense of Englishness that the avant-garde confronts in English literature (36). When Salman Rushdie and other contemporary authors of English literature write about the colonial period from the perspective of the colonized, it confronts that Englishness, casting the work into the avant-garde.
Commenting on the avant-garde, Matei Calinescu (1987) writes:
Modernity has opened the path to the rebellious avant-gardes. At the same time, modernity turns against itself and, by regarding itself as decadence, dramatizes its own deep sense of crisis. The apparently contradictory notions of avant-garde and decadence become almost synonymous and, under certain circumstances, can even be used interchangeably (Calinescu 5)."
At the point where modernity turns against itself in the way that Calinescu describes, it then becomes establishment. It is the abandonment of the Puritanism, and in the case of English literature, in modernity, the abandonment of the colonial romanticism.
Thus, the temporal relativism implied by the aesthetic concept of modernity, and specifically the view that no tradition is by itself more valid than any other, while serving as a justification of the overall antitraditionalism of modernism and the total freedom of individual...
William Galperin (1997) says that there is much being written today that is encouraging, and that there are any number of young scholars and authors bringing the study of the
narrative and romantic period writing to the forefront (877). They are, for all intents and purposes, at present, the avant-garde.
Works Cited
http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98965263
Calinescu, Matei. Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Questia. 21 Apr. 2008 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98965265.
A www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001521655
Galperin, William. "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 37.4 (1997): 877+. Questia. 21 Apr. 2008 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001521655.
Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982. Questia. 21 Apr. 2008 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98086673.
Peppis, Paul. Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde.
