Imperial Aftermath in British Post-World War Two Fiction

Abstract

With the demographic upheavals caused by globalisation, mass migration and a heightened sense of regionalism within the British Isles, the point of an indigenous or essentialist British literary legacy is increasingly lost to those not seeing themselves as heirs to that tradition. The result is that the British literary manner and morals tradition is being increasingly questioned as a model to be emulated. However, the process of questioning makes canonical British writers interesting not only in adversary roles, which may be actualised either as plainly oppositional literary statements or by insistence on post-colonial national independence, but also as foils against which alternative maps may be drawn. Thus, applying an aesthetics of absences, post-colonial criticism has become increasingly interested in the significance of the absent other in ‘all-English/British’ works as nonetheless present, but implicitly so as part of the political/social/economic premises on which literary universes are constructed.

Rather than leaving Britain without a role (as it was glibly supposed to have done), the loss of the Empire was probably deeply resented only by those members of the upper and middle classes who had once felt called to serve it as colonial governors, civil servants, district administrators, and law officers. Its gradual disappearance, together with that of its somewhat exclusive employment opportunities, was steadily compensated for by Britain’s gain of a new cultural diversity following the immigration of a large body of workers, both professional and unskilled, from the Indian sub-continent and the West Indies.

(Sanders, 1994:583–4)