Untimely citizens: Late realism in twentieth-century British literature.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Tsang, Philip, author.

Contributor:

Esty, Joshua, 1967- degree supervisor.

University of Pennsylvania. English.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature.

English--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--English.

Local Subjects:

English literature.

English--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--English.

Genre:

Academic theses.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (239 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 76-05A(E).

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania ; Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest, 2014.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This dissertation investigates the persistent Anglocentrism that punctuates twentieth-century British and Anglophone literatures. In the wake of British imperial decline, writers from Britain's former colonies often inscribe in their works an Anglocentric worldview that looks strikingly out of sync with the political realities of a post-imperial world. Looking at Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul, all of whom grew up outside of England and wrote from a peripheral position in the empire, I attend to the cultural and material existence of the British empire that outlives its geopolitical lifespan. These writers are all reluctant to let go of an obsolete colonial order, a hierarchical core-periphery world system sustained by British imperialism. However, they are not nostalgic about Britain's imperial past, but are deeply troubled by the empire's history of violence and injustice. Pervading their works is a self-conscious untimeliness. As their home countries take leave of the British empire, they refuse to celebrate with their fellow countrymen, and turn their backs on a new world of post-imperial hybridity and cultural mixing. While critics have downplayed or dismissed their anachronistic Anglocentrism, this dissertation homes in on the most unprogressive, eccentric moments in their works in order to address the vexing affective legacy of an obsolete empire. Placing these writers in a realist lineage, I suggest that their works articulate the British empire as a single historical totality as well as a complex network of feelings and identifications. Rather than follow the modernist ethos to fly by the nets of tradition and make it new, these writers hold fast to a world that they have outlived by painstakingly describing it into existence, in an attempt to secure in their own writing a home that was never their home.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-05(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Jed Esty.

Department: English.

Thesis Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2014.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9781321480313

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.