Locating identity: Topographies of Englishness and empire (John Ruskin, E. M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad and Tobago, C. L. R. James, Rudyard Kipling)

This dissertation examines a sequence of nineteenth and twentieth-century narratives of Englishness. Its particular concern is to investigate the ways in which, over the past century and a half, the imperial experience has had impacts on the construction of English identity. Through readings of the works of John Ruskin, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie, the dissertation argues that the discourses of empire and Englishness are so complicit with one another that it is impossible to speak of one without attending to the other, and, more significantly, that in pursuing the business of empire, England suffered an estranging translation of its narratives and spaces of belonging.; In pursuing this argument, I have been particularly attentive to issues of space. The discourses of Englishness examined here repetitively code England as a certain sort of place. In the six chapters of the dissertation, I examine texts which have labored to name England as a gothic architecture, a map, an untouchable body, a cricket field, a ruin, and a riot. In investigating these topographies of Englishness, I consider the ways in which the narratives of imperialism marked England as alternately a disciplinary, a dilapidating, and an unbound cultural habitus. In addressing the erections, and collapsings, of these architectures, I am concerned not only with the structures of the imaginary community or Englishness, but with the subjects who, in inhabiting, vandalizing, or passing through the nation's and the empire's cultural terrains, re-invented these spaces, and were themselves re-invented.; This devotion to the idioms of fabrication is, indeed, central to this dissertation. Finally, what I have attempted to examine are the ways in which a national culture is always uncertain, and to illustrate the means by which the narratives of imperialism, and the post-imperial, reveal that Englishness is always an idea caught within the midst of its own invention.