Revisiting the great good place: The country house, landscape and Englishness in twentieth-century British fiction

The present study purposes to examine the symbolic configuration of landscape for (de)constructing Englishness in twentieth-century British fiction, particularly the works of Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Kazuo Ishiguro. By investigating twentieth-century literary treatments of English landscape and the country house tradition in relation to changing constructions of the national ideology of Englishness, this study aims both to explore the relationships between representations of English landscape and formations of national identity and to examine how Englishness has been reconfigured in recent literary history of the country house novel. The central literary discussion is contextualized in its historical and cultural specificity. After establishing the historical and ideological frame of the country-house aesthetics by putting the present cult of the country house in Britain of the 1980s in the extended historical context of the development of both the English rural idyll and heritage-consciousness from the late nineteenth century on, Chapter I presents a brief examination of the literary perceptions of the country house at the turn of the century as it is represented in Henry James's The Portrait of the Lady (1881), Ford Madox Ford's Good Soldier (1915), and E. M. Forster's The Howards End (1910). Chapter II situates Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) within English culture during the interwar years and in relation to the ideology of Little Englandism. Chapter III poses the question of Englishness in imperial/postimperial space by examining Rhys's rewriting of the English country house in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Chapter IV frames a reading of Ishiguro's critical meditation on Englishness in The Remains of the Day (1989) with an analysis of the national heritage industry in the early 1980s. The last chapter surveys a range of evocations of the country house in contemporary British fiction—V. S. Naipaul's melancholic portrait of a Wiltshire cottage in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Rosa Diamond's English garden in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), Lynde Court in Angela Carter's Wise Children (1991), and the concentrated English heritage theme park in Julian Barnes's England, England (1999)—before analyzing the alternative landscape for the representation of Englishness in Graham Swift's Waterland (1983).