Belated Englishness: Nostalgia and postimperial identity in contemporary British fiction and film (John Fowles, Karel Reisz, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Ivory, Peter Greenaway)

This project takes as its starting point Salman Rushdie's stuttered proclamation that "the trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they do do don't know what it means." If so much of what shaped English identity "happened overseas" in the construction and maintenance of Empire, the loss of that Empire then threatens to unravel a national sense of self constructed abroad. Belated Englishness examines contemporary British fiction and film to map the strategies of these texts in negotiating this unstable identity, an identity in which overseas origins are rendered as a fragmented sense of time. My project charts the manner these narrative strategies of temporal division---nostalgic tones, thematic stress on the impact of setting, and stories notably fractured between the moment told and the moment of telling---betray the lingering legacy of imperial loss. Strategies that disrupt the apparent harmony of time and place (not just the elements of setting, but also the key components of a national sense of self) then resonate with significance beyond the postmodern, for they in fact reveal a national sense of identity still divided between past and present, between homeland and province. This postimperial English identity is situated within recent theories of nation---accounts that chart the signification of nation as one marked by fracture and loss, not unification and harmony. Much of this split hinges on the distinction between Britain and England, a distinction my first chapter by examining competing rubrics of authenticity in The French Lieutenant's Woman. This distinction is also frequently coded through an affiliation of English identity with the pastoral, a theme explored in my second chapter's discussion of temporal layering in The Remains of the Day. My final chapter examines this double time of the nation by situating Prospero's Books in the recent cycle of English heritage cinema. This project concludes by locating these tropes of contemporary Englishness in relation to the heritage industry.