Abstract
In Maps of Englishness Simon Gikandi recounts his time at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s, thinking about empire, writing and identity ‘before the advent of postcolonial theory and cultural studies’.1 In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a PhD student, also from a former colony, seeking intellectual capital abroad at the University of British Columbia. I also was working on the relations between the end of empire and the ‘crisis’ in English identity in a thesis on the fiction of Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry. But my ability to grasp those relations was thwarted not so much by the state of postcolonial or cultural theory as by the peculiar force of the late-settler nationalism I carried with me. As a ‘Pakeha’ (European-descended) New Zealander professionalising myself at a university in another settler nation I had yet fully to confront the awkward cultural politics of decolonisation. The country I had left behind was entering its own identity crisis both as the loyal offspring of a Britain with more pressing concerns than its former colonies and as a settler society beginning to feel its own internal discontents: in particular, an increasingly assertive sovereignty movement among Maori people. Nevertheless, the growing disenchantment among the Pakeha middle class with Prime Minister Rob Muldoon’s revivalist settler state had not yet shocked the underlying structure of settler consciousness into acknowledging its colonial history or the limits of its complacently monocultural nationalism.
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Notes and references
S. Gikandi (1996) Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press), p. ix.
W. Walsh (1977) Patrick White’s Fiction (Sydney: Allen & Unwin), pp. 61, 124–5.
F. Sargeson (1945) Speaking for Ourselves: Fifteen Stories (Christchurch: Caxton).
A. Curnow (1987) Introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, in Look Back Harder: Critical Writings, 1935–1984, ed. P. Simpson (Auckland: Auckland University Press), p. 133.
M. C. Bradbrook (1974) Malcolm Lowry: His Art and Early Life: A Study in Transformation (London: Cambridge University Press), p. 121.
See B. Bergonzi (1970) The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan), pp. 61–2.
M. Bradbury (1973) Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel (London: Oxford University Press), p. 181.
In ‘The Prodigal Son’ White compares his writing to painting: ‘Always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my books the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint, to convey through the theme and characters of Voss what Delacroix and Blake might have seen.’ See White (1989) Patrick White Speaks (Sydney: Primavera), p. 16.
B. Boyd (1992) Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. London: Chatto & Windus), p. 655.
S. During (1993) Patrick White (Melbourne: Oxford University Press), p. 100.
R. Ellmann (1988) Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf), p. 207.
See C. A. Scott (2011) ‘In Camera/On Camera: The Re-Presentation of Janet Frame as a Kiwi Icon’, PhD. Diss. University of Otago.
B. O’Kill (1974) ‘A Stylistic Study of the Fiction of Malcolm Lowry’, PhD. Diss. University of Cambridge, p. 78.
G. MacPhee and P. Poddar (2007) Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books), p. 9.
W. Harris (1981) ‘The Frontier on Which “Heart of Darkness” Stands’, Research in African Literatures, 12:1, 87.
See A. Williamson (2008) ‘Literature’s Ghosts: Realism and Innovation in the Novels of Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt’. PhD. Diss. University of Queensland.
K. C. Kaleta (1998) Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller (Austin: University of Texas Press), p. 3.
D. Coleman (2006) White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 5.
N. Besner (2003) ‘What Resides in the Question, “Is Canada Postcolonial”’, in Is Canada Postcolonial: Unsettling Canadian Literature, ed. L. Moss (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), pp. 42, 43.
A. Riach and M. Williams, eds (1992) The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks by Wilson Harris (Liège: University of Liège), p. 37.
F. Sargeson (1983) Conversation in a Train and Other Critical Writings (Auckland: Oxford University Press), p. 32.
V. O’Sullivan (1994) ‘“Finding the Pattern, Solving the Problem”: K. Mansfield: The New Zealand European’, in Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margins, ed. Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press), 9–24, p. 13.
R. J. C. Young (2008) The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 231.
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© 2014 Mark Williams
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Williams, M. (2014). Between Modernism and the Postcolonial: Reading Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry in the 1970s. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_12
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