Englishness And Imperialism In Pastoral Novels Of Forster, Waugh And Ishiguro

This study examines the transmutation of Englishness in twentieth-century British pastoral fiction, particularly the works of E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro. Over the past century, the ebb and flow of the imperial power has perceptible impacts on the construction of Englishness in three phases of the British Empire, namely, the Edwardian apogee, the midcentury contraction and the final post-imperial dissolution. One noticeable feature of the works written in these different periods is the tendency to describe and idealize a pastoral England of country house and landscape. Through readings of the works of Forster, Waugh and Ishiguro, this study argues that the discourses of empire and pastoral Englishness are interrelated, and more importantly, the shrinking of the empire disturbs a secure sense of national identity which could only be resuscitated in a pastoral England.As a metropolitan writer in the Edwardian era, Forster depicts in his Howards End, a nation deeply inflicted by an alienating imperialism. This novel is a representation of recurring conflicts between two spaces—the metropolitan London of relentless capital and a pastoral England of humanistic values. In Chapter One, I will explain how imperialistic expansion directs to a "metropolitan perception" of infinity and "placelessness". Forster’s condition-of-England novel reasserts a stable Englishness by embracing a pastoral England. Coming to the midcentury, England was painfully coming to terms with its newfound situation of imperial contraction. In Chapter Two I will explore how Englishness is represented as an Anglo-centric insularity in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s novel captures the cultural turn in the midcentury from a metropolitan universalism to an Anglo-centric nativism. Chapter Three will deal with Japanese-born Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day which is a deconstruction of the pastoral myth. Ishiguro renders a post-imperial Englishness as an idea always caught within its own construction. His novel takes advantage of the quintessentially English stereotypes (the butler, the country gentleman) and the trope of the country house and idyllic landscape to reflect on the national consciousness.