TRANSATLANTIC LITERARY TRAVELS: SEVEN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELS ABOUT AMERICA

Since World War Two, an important genre of British novels has emerged, concerned with shaping America into a fiction. The most notable works in this genre are: Anthony Burgess's The Clockwork Testament, Kingsley Amis's One Fat Englishman, Malcolm Bradbury's Stepping Westward, Julian Mitchell's As Far As You Can Go, Andrew Sinclair's The Hallelujah Bum, David Lodge's Changing Places, and Frederic Raphael's California Time. Each novel features a British protagonist whose sensibility is actively engaged in responding to American culture.;After an examination of each novel, the dissertation assesses the importance of this genre on the post-war British novel. While the increasing Americanization of British society and culture has encouraged many British novelists to consciously incorporate American themes and styles into their work, a small but significant number of British publishers and novelists have made a concerted effort to deliberately resist American influences, and to concentrate rather on native resources. Evidently, both the British novel and British culture, I conclude, are becoming polarized by the threat of increasing Americanization.;Using Raymond Williams's notion of the "structure of feeling" as a methodological basis, I place these novels in a tradition of British literary responses to America. Burgess and Amis, because they defend a cherished literary sensibility or aesthetic ideal against a perceived American threat in their respective novels about America, write in a "residual" tradition that connects with nineteenth-century representations by Charles Dickens and Mrs. Frances Trollope. Bradbury and Mitchell remain within a "dominant" tradition, writing novels about British protagonists whose euphoria about America is tempered by their reluctance to sacrifice "English" modes of thought, speech, and dress. Lodge, Sinclair, and Raphael are in an "emergent" tradition, using themes and idioms drawn largely from American literature and featuring protagonists who identify closely with American culture.