Cultural Colonization And Collision In Foreign Affairs

Alison Lurie is one of America’s most famous contemporary novelists, and in recent years she is increasingly attracting wide critical attention in the academic circle at home and abroad. The novel Foreign Affairs won many honors as soon as it came out. This novel won her the Pulitzer Prize, and it was adapted TV series in 1993. With the publication of Foreign Affairs(1984),Alison Lurie has confirmed her center position in the history of American literature. In the novel, Alison Lurie states the romantic love stories of several Americans during their short visit in London, emphatically probes into the cultural collision between British and American culture, and shows the dillusion of romantic love. This novel has two plot lines that occasionally intersect and that implicitly comment on each other. One, an Ivy college professor Virginia Miner engaged in literary study for many years feels self-abased for being American. She met Charles Mumpson, an environmental engineer who comes to Britain for traveling on the plane. Charles Mumpson attempts to seek root in Britain hoping to find the evidence that his ancestors are aristocrat. Instead, he finds his ancestors were born humble not enough to show off in front of his wife’s family. In the end, Chuck Mumpson died of heart attack and Virginia Miner fell into loneliness again. The other one, Vinnie’s colleague Fred Turner was in love with British actress Rosemary Radley. After his romantic love with Rosemary, he was rejected by her. In the end, Fred could do nothing but come back to his wife in America. Their foreign affairs both ended in failure. Through the group of people, Alison Lurie reveals that cultural collision exists and their choices are influenced under the control of colonial mentality.In this novel, Lurie also refers to international themes. Actually, she discusses the problem of cultural leadership between imperialism and colonialism. Although many works involved US foreign cultural imperialism in the contemporary literature, Lurie focuses on their humbleness, otherness, and colonial mentality in this novel.Apart from introduction and conclusion, the paper is divided into three body chapters. Chapter 1 mainly discusses the cultural collision between US and the Old Europe. Chapter 2 narrates the otherness and self-marginalization of the protagonists. Chapter 3 mainly discusses how Lurie describes the colonial mentalities of the protagonists. Based on the body chapters, the paper attempts to reach a conclusion that Americans show their otherness and colonial mentality with the theory of post colonialism.