Cities of affluence and anger: Urbanism and social class in twentieth century British literature.

This dissertation uses literary theory, cultural studies, and human geography to show how social space informs our understanding of narrative form in order to argue that narrative must occupy a place as well as plot a story. By reading urban fiction from the last century, it demonstrates that the modern spatial reorganization of Britain's cities has changed the social meanings attached to narrative. It argues there is a strong connection between literary form and urban geography. Cities provide more than a setting; they participate in the creation of narrative structure. The first chapter studies Howards End and Brideshead Revisited to explore the diminishing role of pastoral literature in the twentieth century. The simple stories in these novels conceal a sophisticated, metafictional plotting device: by narrating the demise of landed families, these texts also historicize the declining significance of the country-house novel in contemporary literature. The following two chapters analyze domestic fiction to explain the textual representation of urban change. The second chapter argues that the novels of the Angry Young Men in the 1950s refashion the domestic narrative as a way to articulate a hyperbolically masculine, working class political consciousness. This style of working class masculinity was enabled by the material geography of postwar urbanism. Chapter three uses The Golden Notebook to interrogate British domesticity from a postcolonial perspective. In response to Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing writes the metropole as the locus of madness, subjecting the colonial center to the scrutiny it once reserved for the periphery. Lessing deploys her intimate knowledge of British social life to satirize and undermine the trope of domesticity in order to destabilize our understanding of colonialism. This dissertation concludes with a reading of The Satanic Verses and postcolonial literature in England. It proposes the term metropolitan postcolonialism to examine how postcolonial immigration has adapted and transformed metropolitan urban space and narrative techniques. This dissertation reconsiders the role of urbanism in the creation of modern fictional form. It argues urban space gives British and postcolonial narratives a cultural and structural language through which they can dramatize the conditions of modern social life.Ph.D.African literatureAsian literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127822/2/3029356.pd