Life Writing and the End of Empire - (New Directions in Life Narrative) by Emma Parker (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first, comparative study of white life writers who migrated to Britain from colonies and former colonies after the Second World War, examining how their autobiographical writings address the legacies of empire.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize 2025

The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives.

Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums.

Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.

Review Quotes

"[A] masterful close reading of the life-writing of Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame ... Parker's work should appeal to all scholars interested in the wider oeuvres of these major writers and also writing teachers, especially those involved with creative non-fiction, since her study adds new dimensions to the intersectionality of fiction and life-writing." --CHOICE

About the Author

Emma Parker is Lecturer in Literature and Gender at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on life writing, modern Anglophone literature, colonialism, and graphic narratives. She is the co-editor of British Culture after Empire (2023).