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

About the Book

"Exploring how legacies of British colonialism have shaped modern life narrative, this book offers comparative studies of four white life writers - Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing and Janet Frame - who wrote and rewrote their childhoods in colonies, international settlements, and protectorates of the British Empire across numerous autobiographical texts. By drawing on their life writings, frequently side-lined for their fiction, Emma Parker illuminates hitherto unrecognized connections between these authors after they travelled from their respective childhood homes in Egypt (Lively), Shanghai (Ballard), Southern Rhodesia (Lessing) and New Zealand (Frame), arriving in London across a twelve-year period from 1945-1957. With their autobiographies intersecting at a crucial historical juncture when colonial rule was being dismantled, this book asks what it means to be 'at home' in the former British Empire, scrutinizing the spaces of habitation and the everyday details through which all four authors remember colonialism, from settler mansions and African farms, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms and photograph albums. Rounding off with an examination of material cultures at the end of empire, Parker emphasizes how four particular artefacts (a tallboy, a suitcase, a traveller's trunk and a duchesse dresser) emblematize and unlock the legacies of colonialism for Lively, Ballard, Lessing and Frame. When read together, these autobiographical texts reveal how empire and its aftermath seeped into everyday life, and that imperialism functioned as part of a given world both during and after colonial rule. Also coining the term 'speculative life writing', describing the practice wherein an author rewrites their previous memoirs or autobiographies with an alternative outcome, this book advances rich readings and new conceptual insights into these esteemed authors and the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies"--

Book Synopsis

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).