Relocating modern British fiction: The case of Anglo-India

This dissertation broadly studies issues of space, modernity and representation as it attempts, to quote Simon Gikandi, "to read Englishness as a cultural and a literary phenomenon produced in the ambivalent space that separated, but also conjoined, metropolis and colony." The project is divided into four chapters, each an examination of the colonial, (specifically Anglo Indian,) dimensions of metropolitan self fashioning as represented in modern British fiction. Conrad's early sea stories, Kipling's Kim, the Anglo Indian fiction of Orwell, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster, and Woolf's The Voyage Out are core texts used to study how emergent cultural discourses---of geography, political economy, gender, and the 'liberal' community---are revised and renegotiated to constitute a modern and 'spatially decentered' aesthetics of self representation.; This hypothesis brings crucial questions of 'emplacement' to bear upon the canon. For example, what is the (formal) geography of cultural modernism? How does it coincide with the political landscape of early twentieth century imperialism? How is the specific text 'situated' in relation to authorial (dis)affiliations and (dis)placements within cultural maps of global exchange, metropolitan citizenship and gendered location? Contemporary theoretical perspectives that investigate the dialectics of social and aesthetic spaces are, therefore, principally useful in this study. The critique of abstract space found in the statements of, for example, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Foucault and Harvey, provide a frame within which the 'Anglo Indian borderland' in modern British fiction may be coincidentally interpreted as the material product of political spatial practices, or as imagined space, contesting the dominant forms of a rational order.