The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction

The Politics of Home draws attention to the multiple relocations that take place in literatures in English in the twentieth century by examining the changing representation of 'home' in such narratives. Through an exploration of imperial fiction, contemporary literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial narratives on belonging, Rosemary Marangoly George argues that complex literary allegiances are visible in textual reformulations of 'home' and that George's concept of 'global English' challenges the very logic of literary landscapes organised in accordance with national boundaries. Reading Englishwomen's narration of their success in the empire against Conrad's account of colonial masculine failure, Frederic Jameson alongside R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai and other contemporary Indian writers with the British Romantic poets in mind, Edward Said next to M. G. Vassanji and Jamacia Kincaid, and Conrad through Naipual and Ishiguro, The Politics of Home explores the privilege and pain underlying 'feeling at home' in literature.