Description
Book SynopsisFirst book-length critical work devoted to the impact of the end of empire and traces of imperial memory in mainstream English Literature since the Second World War. Authors studied include Josephine Tey, William Golding, Penelope Lively, David Peace and Ian McEwan. Represents the best of current scholarship. -- .
Trade ReviewAn exemplary synthesis of literary-historical rigour and stylistic attentiveness
End of Empire unveils the ambivalent nature of post-imperial national identity, shedding a new light not on the empire as such but on its end, decline, and fall.
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Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: end of empire and the English novel (Bill Schwarz)
1. The road to Airstrip One: Anglo-American attitudes in the English fiction of mid-century (Patrick Parrinder)
2. Josephine Tey and her descendants: conservative modernity and the female crime novel (Cora Kaplan)
3. Colonial fiction for liberal readers: John Masters and the Savage family saga (Richard Steadman-Jones)
4. The entropy of Englishness: reading empire’s absence in the novels of William Golding (Rachael Gilmour)
5. The empire of romance: love in a postcolonial climate (Deborah Philips)
6. Passage from Kinjanja to Pimlico: William Boyd’s comedy of imperial decline (Michael L. Ross)
7. Unlearning empire: Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (Huw Marsh)
8. I am not the British Isles on two legs’: travel fiction and travelling fiction from D.H. Lawrence to Tim Parks (Suzanne Hobson)
9. Queer histories and postcolonial intimacies in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (Sarah Brophy)
10. The return of the native: Pat Barker, David Peace and the regional novel after empire (James Procter)
11. Saturday’s enlightenment (David Alderson)
Afterword (Elleke Boehmer)
