Rewriting Englishness: novelistic transformations of an identity

Thesis

The reciprocity between literary innovation and the idea of English identity has so far been vastly underestimated. Histories of ideas over-emphasise the extractable content of a literary work’s articulations of Englishness and inadequately read for form. Symptomatic approaches subordinate literary works to abstract discussions of wider ideological systems. Cosmopolitan analyses neglect the interest of formally unconventional writing in cultural and local belonging. This thesis therefore refocuses attention on how innovative writers at once rewrite Englishness and the novel form. The first chapter examines how Joseph Conrad’s literary experiments with point of view open up an epistemological examination of identity. Staging the distorted perspectives of romantic Englishmen, his novels explore how individuals and novels use the language of Englishness to construct illusive and dangerously fixed kinds of narrative and moral order. The second chapter considers how Virginia Woolf disperses the totalising, masculine perspectives of contemporaneous Englishness and English novel-writing. As the nation faced extinction at the outbreak of the Second World War, however, her late fiction also increasingly incorporates self-criticism, scrutinising the emotional pull of Englishness. The third chapter re-reads V.S. Naipaul’s belated mimicry as an innovative, auto-fictional exploration of his disorientating colonial fantasy of English identity and literature. He thereby develops a different, recursively self-critical way of thinking and writing to the impossibly settled imperial worldview he once idealised. The fourth chapter recovers the formal inventiveness of Kazuo Ishiguro’s staging of stereotypically exaggerated cultural identities and familiar genres of novel-writing. His oeuvre illuminates and ironises how individuals and novels use already given ideas of Englishness and already given forms of writing to find unoriginal and unsatisfying kinds of closure. Read together, these writers simultaneously expand, unsettle and rewrite the kinds of knowledge and self-knowledge involved in articulations of Englishness, thereby reconnecting their readers to the lived complexities of collective life.

Authors: Kadokura, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ov70rk1bm
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Naipaul; Ishiguro; Englishness; identity; Woolf; novel; Eetemology; 20th century; Conrad
• Subjects: Literature and society; English; Literature