End of empire and the English novel since 1945

256 Pages·2011·3.089 MB·English

by  Rachael Gilmour (editor), Bill Schwarz (editor)

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and the English novel since 1945
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This collection explores the history of post-war England during the end
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of empire through readings of a range of novels, from George Orwell
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and William Golding to Penelope Lively, Alan Hollinghurst and lis
Ian McEwan, and in genres including the family saga, travel writing,
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detective fiction and popular romances. All reflect, whether directly
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or obliquely, on the predicament of an England which no longer lies o
at the centre of imperial power, arriving at a fascinating diversity of v
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conclusions about the meaning and consequences of the end of empire.
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s and the
Gilmour and Schwarz link together the historical question of the end of in
the British empire with the literary issue of the place of the English c
novel in the post-war years. Rather than emphasising the ‘provincial’ e

properties commonly ascribed to the postwar English novel, emphasis is 1 English novel
given to the curious echoes and displacements of imperial remembering 9
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which operated during the years of decolonisation. This collection is the
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first to address the literary responses to imperial collapse, using the
privileged location of the novel to consider what decolonisation meant since 1945
for the domestic English population of the metropole. G
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This book will interest scholars and general readers concerned with the lm
fate of the English novel and the domestic impact of decolonisation, and
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is an important contribution to the expanding historical canon which
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deals with the end of empire. r

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Rachael Gilmouris Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Queen Mary,
University of London S
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Bill Schwarzis Reader in Postcolonial Studies at Queen Mary, h
University of London w
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Cover image: Anthony Burgess sailing to Malaya in 1954. z
By kind permission of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation
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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk )
ISBN 978-0-7190-8578-9
Edited by
Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz
end of empire
and the english novel
since 1945
Gilmour and Schwarz, End of Empire and the English Novel.indd 1 18/07/2011 11:14:00
Gilmour and Schwarz, End of Empire and the English Novel.indd 2 18/07/2011 11:14:00
End of empire and the
English novel since 1945
Edited by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Gilmour and Schwarz, End of Empire and the English Novel.indd 3 18/07/2011 11:14:00
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2011
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,
copyright of individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both
author and publisher.
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed in the United States exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillian, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010, USA
Distributed in Canada exclusively by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 07190 8578 9 hardback
First published 2011
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset in Perpetua and Franklin Gothic
by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

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Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
Introduction: End of empire and the English novel
Bill Schwarz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1 The road to Airstrip One: Anglo-American attitudes in the
English fiction of mid-century Patrick Parrinder. . . . . . . . 38
2 Josephine Tey and her descendants: conservative modernity
and the female crime novel Cora Kaplan . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3 Colonial fiction for liberal readers: John Masters and the
Savage family saga Richard Steadman-Jones . . . . . . . . . . 74
4 The entropy of Englishness: reading empire’s absence in the
novels of William Golding Rachael Gilmour . . . . . . . . . 92
5 The empire of romance: love in a postcolonial climate
Deborah Philips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
6 Passage from Kinjanja to Pimlico: William Boyd’s comedy of
imperial decline Michael L. Ross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
7 Unlearning empire: Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger
Huw Marsh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
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vi contents
8 ‘I am not the British Isles on two legs’: travel fiction and
travelling fiction from D.H.Lawrence to Tim Parks
Suzanne Hobson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
9 Queer histories and postcolonial intimacies in Alan
Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty Sarah Brophy . . . . . . . 184
10 The return of the native: Pat Barker, David Peace and the
regional novel after empire James Procter. . . . . . . . . . 203
11 Saturday’s Enlightenment David Alderson . . . . . . . . . . 218
Afterword: The English novel and the world
Elleke Boehmer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of
London, in particular to Tim Bell; and to Matthew Frost and his colleagues at
Manchester University Press.
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Contributors
David Alderson is Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at
the University of Manchester and Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong
University. His publications include the co-edited collection Territories
of Desire in Queer Culture (Manchester University Press, 2000), and most
recently, Terry Eagleton (Palgrave, 2004). He has written about Alan
Hollinghurst, Will Self and Mark Ravenhill as part of a larger project on
post-gay culture currently being completed.
Elleke Boehmer has published four widely praised novels, Screens
against the Sky (Bloomsbury, 1990; short-listed David Higham Prize),
An Immaculate Figure (Bloomsbury, 1993), Bloodlines (David Philip,
2000; short-listed Sanlam Prize) and Nile Baby (Ayebia Clarke, 2008).
Internationally known for her research in international and postcolonial
writing, she is the author of the world best-seller Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford University Press, 1995 and 2005), the
monographs Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford
University Press, 2002) and Stories of Women (Manchester University
Press, 2005) and of Nelson Mandela (Oxford University Press, 2008).
She has also produced the acclaimed edition of Robert Baden-Powell’s
Scouting for Boys (Oxford University Press, 2004). In 2009 she co-edited
essay collections on J.M.Coetzee and on ‘postcolonial terror’. She is the
General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series.
Sharmilla and Other Portraits (Jacana, 2010) is her first collection of short
stories. Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English
at the University of Oxford.
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contributors ix
Sarah Brophy is Associate Professor in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. She is the
author of Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning
(University of Toronto Press, 2004); writers discussed in this study include
Derek Jarman, Amy Hoffman, Eric Michaels and Jamaica Kincaid. She
has published articles in Contemporary Women’s Writing (on Andrea Levy),
Literature and Medicine, scrutiny2 and PMLA; and chapters in Teaching Life
Writing and Critical Essays on Pat Barker. With the support of a Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant she is currently writing
a book on sexualities in British fiction, film and autobiography since 1945.
She is also editing a collection of essays on embodied politics in visual
autobiography in collaboration with Janice Hladki.
Rachael Gilmour is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the School of
English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, where she
teaches postcolonial and Black British literature. Her research focuses
primarily upon issues of language, translation, and linguistic encounter
in colonial and postcolonial contexts – from eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century South Africa, to contemporary multilingual Britain. She is the
author of Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South
Africa (Palgrave 2006). Her current research addresses the work of
translingual writers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. She is
on the editorial board of Literature and History, and is a contributing editor
of Wasafiri.
Suzanne Hobson is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature in the
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. Her
research focuses on British and American modernism and literary theory
and she has published articles on D.H.Lawrence, Mina Loy and H.D.
She is co-editor of the Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Salt, 2010) and author
of Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics, 1910–1960 (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011). She has been co-organiser of the London Modernism
Seminar since 2007.
Cora Kaplan is Honorary Professor of English at Queen Mary, University
of London and has held chairs in English at Southampton University and
Rutgers University. A feminist cultural critic with a particular interest in
women’s writing, popular culture and questions of race, gender, class and
empire from the late eighteenth century to the present, her work includes
Sea Changes: Essays in Culture and Feminism (Verso, 1986) and, with David
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