'England, my England': Re-imagining Englishness in modernist and contemporary novels

This dissertation critically examines the link between British modernist and post-World War II novels that reflect, challenge and sometimes reinforce notions of Englishness, or English national identity and culture. While colonial discourse theory tends to emphasize the connection between colonialist literature from the Victorian era and postcolonial texts, this project focuses instead on the presence of empire in modernist novels and relates this to representations of English national identity in late-twentieth century fiction. Each chapter juxtaposes a modernist and contemporary novel as a means of exposing the neglected but important connection between early and late twentieth-century visions of Englishness. Virginia Woolf's canonical Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for instance, reveals the impact of cultural icons and images on the national imagination during the waning years of empire following World War I. Read alongside Woolf's text, Julian Barnes' England, England (1998) points to a shift in the perception of the symbolic objects of the empire-less nation. D.H. Lawrence's fictional vision of Australia, Kangaroo (1923), is read in relation to Matthew Kneale's historical rewriting of nineteenth-century colonial genocide in Tasmania, English Passengers (2000), underscoring the way in which English national identity was formulated against the backdrop of its colonial outposts during the era of empire. Finally, I contend that Jean Rhys's semi-autobiographical Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Joan Riley's fictionalization of late twentieth-century English racism in the The Unbelonging (1985) expose gendered, class and racial constructions of Englishness from a West Indian perspective. These texts demonstrate that constructions of Englishness in the twentieth-century work to exclude from a space of national belonging those who fail to adhere to specific sets of nation-based gender, race and class expectations. This study enables a re-imagining of English identity and culture by illuminating the nationalistic constructions of these separate historical moments; ultimately, though, it tells us less about what and who the English are than it does about the implications of such identifications.