• Thesis
  • Post-imperial Phantom Pains

Post-imperial Phantom Pains : Negotiating Reception and Text in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday

This thesis is an analysis of the negotiation of reception and text within contemporary English literature via three contemporary English novels, Possession, On Beauty, and Saturday. Within the three novels, the use of a powerful aesthetic enables access to beauty and truth, heretofore realities beyond the grasp of postmodern and post-structuralist discourses. All three novels critique said discourses with respect to cultural production, selfhood, and safety and, in so doing, create identity narratives that lean heavily on Romantic codes of creativity, power, and place. This, so I argue, makes them romantic realist texts. Additionally, Possession, On Beauty, and Saturday reveal an intriguing post-colonial dynamic within the English cultural space they establish, a dynamic where imperial discourses echo strongly, echoes I define as post-imperial phantom pains.

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Thesis advisor:
Heyl, Christoph
Date Created:
23.07.2018
Date submitted:
07.07.2015
Date of doctoral degree:
13.04.2016
Date Issued:
23.07.2018
URN:
urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-20180723-105315-5
Language:
English
Type of Resource:
Text
Keywords:
British Literature; British Culture; English Literature; English Culture; Post-colonial Studies; Post-colonial; Post-imperial; Empire; Identity; Narrative; Post-structuralism; Postmodernism; Reception Theory; Cultural Studies; Literary Studies; Contemporary English Literautre; Contemporary British Literature; New Literatures; Contemporary Literature; Victorian Studies; 19th Century English Literature
Collection:
E-Dissertations
Dewey Decimal Classification:
800 Literature
Subject categories of the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie:
800 Literature & rhetoric
Hosting institution:
Faculty of Humanities, Department of Anglophone Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, British Literature and Culture

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