'This, this is England, but we only passed by.' Reclamations and subversions of English national identity in works by Woolf, Waugh, Rhys and Naipaul (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh, V. S. Naipaul, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago)

My dissertation investigates the ways in which literary works by Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Jean Rhys, and V.S. Naipaul alternately construct, resist, and subvert an English national identity that falsely promises universal citizenship and identity to English subjects worldwide.; The first two novels I consider---Virginia Woolf 's Orlando and Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall---illustrate how this identity is constructed through a rhetoric of return from foreign (preferably colonial) parts, and how Englishness itself remains a performative identity, practiced and consolidated in the affirming presence of the colonial other. Nevertheless, colonial narratives like Orlando and Decline and Fall present English national identity as transhistorically enduring, generated in England, and predating any contact with the colonial other.; Furthermore, Orlando presents this national identity as aristocratically-centered and identified, despite Woolf s attempts to subvert male aristocratic hegemony via the deconstruction of gender binaries. Decline and Fall also demonstrates the enduring aristocratic affiliations of English national identity; Waugh's middle-class protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather and his failure to obtain for himself the status of gentleman exemplifies what Tom Nairn calls the "strategy of absorption" practiced by aristocratically-founded and identified English institutions like Oxbridge and Parliament which, as Nairn says, "co-opt emerging leaders from below."; Orlando and Decline and Fall lament the "decline" of an aristocratically-dominated, rural England forever changed by the incursions of modernity, the bourgeoisie, and colonial subjects. V.S. Naipaul's postcolonial work The Enigma of Arrival, problematizes the very notion of a past, perfect England and an English national identity available to all English subjects, revealing instead that a static English past never existed, and that Naipaul will never wholly participate in the English national identity that interpellates him as a subject, not a citizen. Jean Rhys's postcolonial text, Voyage in the Dark, painfully exemplifies the fallout of a marketed English national identity and fantasy England on colonial subjects in its depiction of Anna Morgan's alienation and disenchantment in England. Nevertheless, despite Naipaul and Rhys's poignant portrayals of the alienation experienced by colonial subjects in England, their texts demonstrate the power of postcolonial texts in articulating an English national identity that is neither white nor aristocratic.