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British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel offers the first detailed discussion of middlebrow fiction by women writers who personally witnessed the dismantling of the British Empire, the intensification of the Cold War, and the domestic tensions following the arrival of thousands of migrants from Britain s former colonies. Studying selected novels by Cecilie Leslie, Elspeth Huxley, Mary McMinnies, Han Suyin and Kamala Markandaya, this study demonstrates that women s middlebrow writing reveals a much deeper engagement with the politics and economics of decolonisation than is usually ascribed to the genre. As Anne Wetherilt argues, by transcending the politics of domesticity, the female middlebrow registers a critique of both Britain s colonial history and mainstream conceptions of decolonisation as a well-managed transition from empire to commonwealth. As such, the middlebrow novel of the immediate post-war decades takes us back to a place where the end of empire was imagined rather than denied, and the ambiguities of British colonial politics exposed, rather than repressed.
Sommario
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The Raj wasnt feeling so sure of itself Cecilie Leslie and the Crisis of Empire.- Chapter 3: Everyone knew about Mau Mau Elspeth Huxley and the Kenyan Emergency.- Chapter 4: It was a snipers war Mary McMinnies and the Malayan Emergency.- Chapter 5: The goddess is angry at the dam Han Suyin and the politics of development.- Chapter 6: They had felt the glancing blow of social change Kamala Markandaya and the politics of dam building.- Chapter 7: It was all too confusing Elspeth Huxley and metropolitan disorder.-
Info autore
Anne Wetherilt
is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The Open University, UK. In 2024, she completed a Ph.D. in English at the Open University, funded by the Open Oxford Cambridge (OOC) Doctoral Training Partnership. She also holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for many years in public policy. Her broader interests span postcolonial and global literatures, Cold War fiction and middlebrow culture more generally. Her current research focuses on the relationship between development economics and the postcolonial novel.
Riassunto
British Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel
offers the first detailed discussion of middlebrow fiction by women writers who personally witnessed the dismantling of the British Empire, the intensification of the Cold War, and the domestic tensions following the arrival of thousands of migrants from Britain’s former colonies. Studying selected novels by Cecilie Leslie, Elspeth Huxley, Mary McMinnies, Han Suyin and Kamala Markandaya, this study demonstrates that women’s middlebrow writing reveals a much deeper engagement with the politics and economics of decolonisation than is usually ascribed to the genre. As Anne Wetherilt argues, by transcending the politics of domesticity, the female middlebrow registers a critique of both Britain’s colonial history and mainstream conceptions of decolonisation as a well-managed transition from empire to commonwealth. As such, the middlebrow novel of the immediate post-war decades takes us back to a place where the end of empire was imagined rather than denied, and the ambiguities of British colonial politics exposed, rather than repressed.
