Reimagined communities: The critique of nationalism in modernist and postcolonial narratives

This dissertation explores the challenge that narrative forms, in modernist and postcolonial novels, pose to the logic of nationalism. Studies and theorizations of nationalism, like Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities , frequently acknowledge the importance of narratives for creating and consolidating a particular nationalism. In these accounts, a central component of what underpins nationalism is a narrative of untroubled continuity from past, to present, and into the future. This narrative of continuity and connection is what I call the logic of nationalism. Critics have largely ignored the complication that the form of narrative fiction offers to the study of nationalism. The logic of nationalism is subject to revision and critique by fictional forms because they both work through narrative and temporal structures. These temporal structures are the point of leverage for the critique of nationalism by fictional narratives. Bringing together the political concerns of postcolonial theory and theories of nationalism with the aesthetic concerns of narrative theory, this dissertation engages in a mode of reading that posits a politics of form. The dissertation considers the development of nationalism in the twentieth century in the wake of British imperialism and the rise of postcolonial nation states. The authors I explore here---Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o---represent a diverse cross-section of writers responding, at different historical moments, to the intersection of the national and the empire. The novels treated here all present complex structures that resist the logic of nationalism through their use of interruption and disorder. These texts' disruptive temporal structures challenge and refigure the notion of continuity underpinning the sense of national community. The forms of these novels work in tandem with the content to offer, to the reader, alternative forms of imagining national communities.