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Full Description
This book is about the Booker Prize - the London-based literary award made annually to "the best novel written in English" by a writer from one of those countries belonging to, or formerly part of, the British Commonwealth. The approach to the Prize is thematically historical and spans the award period to 1999. The novels that have won or shared the Prize in this period are examined within a theoretical framework mapping the literary terrain of the fiction. Individual chapters explore themes that occur within the larger narrative formed by this body of novels - collectively invoked cultures, social trends and movements spanning the stages of imperial heyday and decline as perceived over the past three decades. Individually and collectively, the novels mirror, often in terms of more than a single static image, British imperial culture after empire, contesting and reinterpreting perceptions of the historical moment of the British Empire and its legacy in contemporary culture.
The body of Booker novels narrates the demise of empire and the emergence of different cultural formations in its aftermath. The novels are grouped for discussion according to the way in which they deal with aspects of the transition from empire to a post-imperial culture - from early imperial expansion, through colonization, retrenchment, decolonization and postcolonial pessimism, to the emergence of tribal nationalisms and post-imperial nation-states. The focus throughout is primarily literary and contingently cultural.
Contents
1. The Crystal Palace: Novels of the Raj
Anglo-India: Nostalgia for the Raj
A minor victory: J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
India revisited: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (1975)
Anglo-India, together and alone: Paul Scott's Staying On (1978)
'Orientalism' and inversions of 'self'
2. Narratives of Enlightenment and European Expansionism
The Enlightenment
Liberation from history: John Berger's G. (1972)
Empire at sea: William Golding's Rites of Passage (1980)
Deeds of Empire: Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992)
Oskar Schindler: Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (1982)
Anthem for doomed youth: Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995)
European expansionism
3. Postcolonial Pessimisms
Disaffection and malaise
Migrant displacements: V.S. Naipaul's In A Free State (1971)
Colonial dislocations: Nadine Gordimer's The Conservation
Primordial state: J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (1983)
Fantasy and biculturalism: Keri Hulme's the bone people (1985)
Colonial folly: Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
Echoes of disharmony
4. Postmodernism and History
The end of the metanarrative
Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and literary studies after Empire
A history of the world: Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (1987)
Scholarship and detection: A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990)
Magical realism and African cosmopolitanism: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991) Cultural fragmentations: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992)
Dismantling the Enlightenment
5. 'Englishness' and 'Domestic' Lives
Insularities: The inwardness of post-imperial Britain
Empire's Others: Bernice Rubens' The Elected Member (1970)
Taking a break: Stanley Middleton's Holiday (1974)
Nature or nurture: David Storey's Saville (1976)
Curtain call: Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1977)
Empire's twilight: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989)
'Englishness' and 'domestic' lives
6. The English Abroad
Ex-centricity and eccentricities: The English Abroad
Crisis of Commonwealth: P.H. Newby's Something To Answer For (1969)
Between land and sea: Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore (1979)
Continental drift: Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac (1984)
Narratives of insularity
7. 'Post-Imperials': The British Postcolonials
The British and the new Britain
Fakes and originals: Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils (1986)
Towards an Irish literary postmodernism: Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha HaHa (1993)
Grim and demotic: James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
'Post-imperials': The British postcolonials
Conclusion: The Booker Prize and the Culture of Post-Imperialism
Coda: The Booker Prize Winners 1996-1999
"Language is the skin on my thought": Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
At crossroads: lan McEwan's Amsterdam (1998)
Golden days before they end: Graham Swift's Last Orders (1996)
Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999)
Appendix: The Booker Prize - A Listing 1969-2001
Select Bibliography
