Rewriting the colonized past through textual strategies of exclusion

This study examines four historical novels written by authors from former or existing British colonies, exploring the works' activist potential, that is, their ability to function as more than just escapist reading. The novels' publication dates range over the last two hundred years, allowing the study to investigate changes in how authors use language and structure as tools to raise issues about how history is recorded. After a discussion of the origins and potential cultural work of historical fiction in general, the four novels are discussed in terms of how their styles and structures work to exclude or include certain audiences.The earliest two novels in this study, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), perform and complicate exclusion, reclaiming history by (among other things) taking possession of the language of conquest, English, and using it to push to the periphery the former (or presumptive) rulers of that language and the power associated with its use. Each novel employs a disempowered character who uses a non-standard, hybridized form of English to narrate the story. The editorial apparatus of each novel, which includes prefaces, glossaries, and footnotes, is examined in terms of how it impacts readers' reactions and comprehensionThe two contemporary novels, J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1992), in addition to displaying the formerly silenced perspectives of Others and then enacting their erasure, employ intertextual referencing as a method of exclusion. Each novel's structure uses narrative reiteration as a method for raising questions about perspective and historical truth. Historical novels have been an important tool in generating a cohesive national consciousness in many nations over the past two hundred years. This study investigates how they can also be used to provide alternatives to that monolithic sense of the past when they depict and enact exclusion.Department of EnglishThesis (Ph.D.