"Imagination's Commonwealth": Edmund Blunden's Hong Kong dialogue

Abstract

This essay posits that literary studies at the University of Hong Kong during the cold war 1950s exemplify how English as an academic subject is transmuted through the peripheral voices that engage with metropolitan literature. Focusing on the term "imagination's commonwealth," which the poet and critic Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) invented to denote transnational literary communion, I show how it departs from imperial literary diffusion and how Blunden's poetry and professorial career at Hong Kong University enact the departure. As his interlocutors and partners, Blunden's students played a crucial role in the emergence of a literary commonwealth. In their dialogue with Blunden, they not only query his conception but also push against the boundaries or their own colonial ana cold war situation.