From the Margins of History: Everyday Life and Narrating the Nation in British Fiction and Cinema After 1940
2021-07
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From the Margins of History: Everyday Life and Narrating the Nation in British Fiction and Cinema After 1940
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2021-07
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Analyzing British literary and cinematic texts since the Second World War, this project examines how these works embrace everyday life as a set of experiences that complicate official narratives of history and national identity. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, there have been numerous efforts to define and rebuild a coherent British national character, in response to rapid and threatening social upheavals including the decline of the British Empire, postwar immigration, and economic globalization. Literature and cinema record this social transition in order to discover the possibility of a common culture; at the same time, they willfully challenge a fixed and stereotypical idea of British identity by exposing various gender, class, and racial differences and conflicts hidden behind monolithic accounts of the nation. Virginia Woolf, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon present prewar and postwar Britain as a zone of competing voices. They show how native and immigrant British subjects respectively produce critical readings of the island’s spatial history to deal with the sense of radical loss and dislocation caused by the War and decolonization. Toward the end of the century, Mike Leigh and W. G. Sebald register the unspoken boredom and melancholy deeply felt by historically marginalized individuals, representing multifaceted temporalities that effectively disrupt and renounce Britain’s linear narrative of progress and civilization. In particular, I focus on the ways these novels and films imagine diverse spatial and temporal narratives through their serious engagement with everyday life. As a perpetual emergent social sphere of human existence, the everyday in these texts marks a tension between collective and individual consciousness that encompasses locally situated aspects, power, knowledge, and the imagination of the social actors involved. The writers in my project locate these daily tensions in a dynamic social domain, in which a familiar story of the traditional community is constantly negotiated and sometimes subverted by another form of narrative signaled by creative interactions between ordinary people and their surroundings. Taking a cue from the theories of the everyday life, I argue that these authors’ aesthetic commitment to representing daily perceptions, memories, and experiences revitalizes more inclusive and democratic modes of social existence in a society dominated by hierarchical and standardizing principles of capitalist modernity and the post-imperial nation-state.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2021. Major: English. Advisor: Siobhan Craig. 1 computer file (PDF); iii, 235 pages.
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Jeon, Bomi. (2021). From the Margins of History: Everyday Life and Narrating the Nation in British Fiction and Cinema After 1940. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/258763.
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