Subjects of the realm: Reconfiguring national identity in postwar Britain
Abstract
This study investigates Ann Stoler's belief that the project of colonization was as much an internal event as it was an external event and attempts to answer Gayatri Spivak's polemic, “Can the subaltern speak?” Examining a selection of postwar texts by working class, Black, female, and queer British writers, this study analyzes the structural and thematic challenges that these voices use in an attempt to find a space amid dominant literary forms. Although the selected texts do find a voice, it is the study's ultimate conclusion that the spaces are temporary and that the voices are ultimately absorbed and diluted within a bourgeois cultural apparatus.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Rowe, Purdue University.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
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