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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Sun-Drowned Streets and Wasted Lives

  • from Part III - Revolutions and Empires
  • Edited by Andrew Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Nation in British Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 225-240

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the colonial novel of the 1920s–1940s as a form that mediates and distils the imperial logic that connects the nation and the colony. Divided into two sections, the chapter argues that the colonial novel thinks about the difference – even as it brings that difference into being – between that which is the imperial-national and that which constitutes the colonial, and the relationship between the two. The first section focuses on the representations of the colonial club – the center of political, economic, social and affective energy – as the natural site for exploring the emergence and decline of the British colonial sphere and its relationship with the imperial structures of the nation. The second section examines how two late colonial novels depict the impotence, misery and accrued weariness of imperial rule. The novels carefully and deliberately unravel any notion of imperial authority, in institutions or in individuals, and foreground the distance between imperial rhetoric and colonial reality.