Conscience and Conformity: Societal Roles and Individual Actions in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”

<i>Neil Lazarus</i> The Postcolonial Unconscious<i>The Postcolonial Unconscious</i>. Neil Lazarus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+299.

The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature John Marx (bio) Keywords postcolonial literature, postcolonial studies, Marxist criticism, globalization and literature, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson The Postcolonial Unconscious. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Neil Lazarus describes a field of postcolonial literature that is both too big and too small. Too big, in that this "vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus" contains too many works published in too many places and circulating in too many ways to be neatly summed up (35). The field is too small, however, in that few postcolonial works actually garner anything like meaningful scholarly attention. Saying he is "tempted to overstate the case," Lazarus declares "that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—are endlessly, not to say catechistically, cited in the critical literature" (22). The point remains even if one is inclined to supplement this canon with another likely suspect or two—J.M. Coetzee, say, or Arundhati Roy. Many literary fields combine sublime abundance with restrictive canonicity, which means the situation Lazarus describes is hardly unique. As it might for any other field, furthermore, Lazarus believes that in postcolonial studies shuttling between too big and too small has produced intellectual stasis. The field's band of privileged authors and works has become so stock as to breed boredom, if not outright contempt. At the same time, the idea that a much larger range of works might be included in the postcolonial canon can only appear as a threat to supporters of the curriculum's current composition. Given that postcolonial literary studies has historically embraced its reputation as a [End Page 389] scholarly insurgency, it is noteworthy to find Lazarus arguing that the field has transformed into yet another subdiscipline interested more than anything else in policing its own boundaries. The goal of The Postcolonial Unconscious is to figure out how and why this has happened and what to do about it. After his Introduction frames the project with a telling history of the field, Lazarus's two most substantial chapters tackle the prospects for revising scholarship's relationship to postcolonial literature. The remaining three chapters of The Postcolonial Unconscious consider how the field might revisit three major theorists: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Fredric Jameson. When he distinguishes between postcolonial literature in all of its incipient variety and postcolonial studies in its increasingly narrow institutional form, Lazarus makes clear that he is not against institutionalization per se. To the contrary, what he would like is to build a postcolonial studies that is adequate to its literary objects. Adequacy is a key term in The Postcolonial Unconscious, and captures the ideal of a "vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle, systematisable archive of literary works" (115). Adequacy will only be achieved, Lazarus supposes, by opposing "the ideological and epistemological assumptions that have tended to frame postcolonial studies" while avoiding the pitfall of replacing one programmatic set of assumptions with another (36). It also means specifying what a postcolonial studies informed not only by literary criticism but also by philosophy, art history, sociology, anthropology, and various area studies has to learn from such a diverse, but "systematisable" body of literary works. "There is a clear discrepancy or disjunction," Lazarus explains, "between what a very large amount of this literature has tended to show and what most postcolonialist critics have tended to register as significant. My proposal is that where the two forms of discourse (that is, '"postcolonial" literature' and 'postcolonial criticism') diverge, we would do well to think hard about the understandings in play in the former before moving to ratify those prevailing in the latter" (115). The task at hand, he argues, is figuring out the best method for discovering what literature can show scholars across the interdisciplinary range of postcolonial studies. Developing a cultural materialist perspective, Lazarus tests the limits of what postcolonial studies has been able to think about its foundational theoretical texts as well as its literary ones. The notion that postcolonial studies should have conceptual limits to test is not necessarily intuitive. Even though postcolonial in...

Through the utilization of Marxist feminist literary theory, the current article analyzes Catherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party" to examine the interconnected themes of class consciousness, gender, and social injustice. With a specific focus on the protagonist, Laura Sheridan, and her gradually evolving awareness of class, the article examines the narrative's suburban New Zealand setting and the social hierarchy between the affluent Sheridans and their less fortunate neighbors. The luxurious garden party serves as a poignant reminder of the upper class's disconnection from society and their condescending attitudes towards individuals of lower status. In addition to this, the article delves into gender and its effects on the characters' experiences and expectations. Its objective is to gain an understanding of the social realities of the time through the theoretical lens of Marxist feminism and address the pressing concerns of that era. Specifically, the article examines how Laura's representation of class consciousness reflects the societal power dynamics of the time, how the intersection of gender and class influences Laura's mixed feelings about the class system in her social environment, and how "The Garden Party" demonstrates the impact of class and gender on social hierarchies and power structures in the early twentieth century. The article draws attention to the pressing social concerns of the time. It demonstrates how the theoretical lens of Marxist feminism can aid in understanding the social realities of the past.

Reviewed by: George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London Annette Gilson Kristin Bluemel . George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. New York: Palgrave, 2004. xi + 246 pp. Kristin Bluemel's book on "intermodernism" invents a new literary category through which to read selected works of British literature from the 1930s and 1940s. Intermodernism, Bluemel explains, is not a period so much "as a kind of writing, discourse, or orientation . . . that competes with others for particular years or texts or personalities" and that "can help scholars design new maps for the uncharted spaces between and within modernisms" (6). Thus Bluemel intends intermodernism to provide a way of reading and theorizing texts and trends that have been left out by standard period treatments of 1930s and 40s literature and, by extension, to provide a more cohesive and complex sense of the cultural and political landscape of that particular historical moment. Though George Orwell is the only writer named in the book's title, his work is not the only focus of this study. Instead, Bluemel recontextualizes Orwell's political and literary output by placing it in relation to the work of three authors with whom he worked and socialized in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, rather than starting with her chapter on Orwell, Bluemel begins with a chapter each on Stevie Smith, Mulk Raj Anand, and Inez Holden, authors who, despite their professional and literary connections, have not received the same critical attention as other writers from the period and certainly not the kind of attention received by Orwell. Bluemel suggests that the critical neglect suffered by these authors has to do with their resistance to easy categorization; in part, it is their eccentric and (at times) radicalized relationship to their society that has caused scholars to pass over them. Indeed, she implies that it is possible that consideration of these authors could unmake some dearly held critical commonplaces (that is, the radical—and noble—isolation of George Orwell), and rather than remake the theories, perhaps critics have found it easier to scrap the authors. The extended comparison that the study makes between the eccentric radicalisms of Smith, Anand, and Holden and the socially-accepted and even acclaimed radicalism of George Orwell is deftly accomplished, inviting readers, as they [End Page 242] read the analyses of each individual author, to keep in mind the sophisticated overarching structure that points to our assumptions about the true nature of radicalism and the kinds of eccentric behavior we are prepared to accept. The first chapter explores Stevie Smith's use of suburban satire as a means of critiquing—and also fashioning—nationalist rhetoric. Bluemel argues that what is valuable about Smith's work is her "confrontation with the painful pieces of a traditional English nationalism, its imperialism, its militarism, and its anti-Semitism, and her creation out of this confrontation of a new ideal of Englishness based on ordinary suburban life" (66). The chapter on Mulk Raj Anand deals with a very different set of theoretical concerns, and in it we see Bluemel's considerable scholarship and mastery of widely varying theoretical discourses in impressive evidence. The chapter deftly contextualizes Anand's position as an Indian writer in England whose nationalist, anti-imperialist views radicalized and marginalized him. Anand was an astute colonial critic who also espoused a well-intentioned belief in the right to female equality, yet he also contributed to some of the most clichéd notions of women's subjectivity, seemingly blind to his own dependence in his novels on using stereotypical representations of women to create narrative momentum. Bluemel acknowledges the importance of Anand's representations of (male) outcaste members of Indian society in sympathetic, fully realized characterizations and argues that Anand (unconsciously) used the stereotypes of women to "smooth away threats of cross-cultural difference posed by his male protagonists" and thereby make his fiction more acceptable to British audiences (80). This chapter ends by considering ways in which Anand could be used to challenge and complicate current "postcolonial criticism that is deeply skeptical about the possibility or meaning of individual dissent" (99). For her, the individual dissent of radical eccentrics can help us...

In his book The Postcolonial Unconscious , Neil Lazarus writes that postcolonial scholars today ought … to redress a long-standing imbalance in postcolonial literary studies by focusing anew on realist writing. The point is that, inasmuch as the dominant aesthetic dispositions in postcolonial literary studies have from the outset reflected those in post-structuralist theory generally, the categorical disparagement of realism in the latter field has tended to receive a dutiful – if wholly unjustified and unjustifiable – echo in the former… There is no good reason for scholars in postcolonial studies to hang on to this dogma today.(82) It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that postcolonial studies – as an academic field based mainly in literary departments – has generally demonstrated a lack of interest in the formal complexities of literary realism. To many postcolonial critics, realism as a literary form fits poorly with the field's dogmas and values – the established theoretical concepts that characterize the orthodox postcolonial text analysis. The theoretical vocabulary – mainly derived from poststructuralist theory, as Lazarus points out – has on the one hand been crucial in terms of the formation of postcolonial studies as an academic field; on the other hand, the at times exaggerated use of concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, catachresis, the in-between, and so on means that many postcolonial literary readings have tended to say more about postcolonial studies as an academic institution and as a theoretical orientation than about the texts themselves. Often, postcolonial critics have focused on anti-realist literary forms – that is, forms seen as corresponding to the institutionalized postcolonial vocabulary – whereas literary forms belonging to the so-called realist tradition have typically been read along a thematic register or labeled inherently Eurocentric, essentialist, and homogenizing. Realism as a literary form constitutes, in other words, a kind of blind spot in postcolonial studies, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition.

This study tried to discover British colonial power in George Orwell’s Burmese Days. Gramsci's hegemony theory regarding to a concept of an integral state was applied. A qualitative descriptive method was used in the study. Data in the study were dialogues and narratives from historical contacts between British and Burmese regarding the British colonial regime. The data consisted intrinsic element of theme, and 2 extrinsic elements of political society and civil society. Both elements were structure in literary works, and represent the British colonial power in George Orwell’s Burmese Days. A theme of colonial was found among the element of fiction. There were extrinsic elements such as political society and civil society. The study concluded that the intrinsic elements forming a story that could representative how the British colonial power appeared on theme. The relationship of both elements form totality of meaning and integrity that how the British colonial power operations in George Orwell’ Burmese Days. Keywords: colonialism, hegemony, integral state, orientalism

‘Postcolonial studies’ is the term given to the study of diaspora and the ideology of colonialism. Since the 1970s, when postcolonial studies was termed ‘Third World’ literature, and the 1980s, when it became ‘Commonwealth’ literature, the persistence of the framework of centre and margin, coloniser and colonised, has endured as a lens with which to view human identity and cultural expression. However, the relationship of postcolonial studies to international development is less well explored. Much of postcolonial studies is concerned with articulating patterns of gain, loss, inclusion, exclusion, identity formation and change, cultural evolution and human geographical dispersal in the wake of the after-effects of colonial rule. Postcolonial critics examine texts and images in order to make inferences about the significance of cultural identity and expression under these conditions. Often this is with a diachronic view of history. International development studies offers postcolonial critics a synchronic perspective on both the policy and materiality of political ideologies affecting cultural identity and expression. This paper looks at how the relationship between postcolonial and international development studies might be furthered in a dialectical exchange. Postcolonial critics such as Said and Pollard et al offer a critical understanding that informs policy making in international development contexts.

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

The world faces unprecedented land-use pressures, and one of our societal roles as geoscientists is to document, measure, and analyse landscape degradation, producing understanding that can mitigate or help prevent ongoing damage. We do this in a framework of prior studies that shape the way we understand the system and how it operates, which thereby also shapes how we construct research questions and design data collection. This is, of course, how science operates. However, sometimes we need to step back and examine the foundations of our guiding framework.Doing this exercise for geomorphologic interpretations of landscape change in the Global South reveals a buried legacy of colonial-era assumptions and assertions about harmful impacts of indigenous/traditional land-use practices: a &amp;#8220;narrative of blame&amp;#8221; that targets Global South populations. Global North colonists, seeing unfamiliar countryside managed with unfamiliar techniques, wrote interpretive descriptions of what they perceived as degraded landscapes&amp;#8212;but which were based primarily on their experiences elsewhere and/or which drew on gut feelings coming from a lack of local knowledge and inherent disdain for the native population and their methods. These ideas were published, repeated, restated and rephrased, achieving over time the status of received wisdom. They are still recycled today, as part of literature review and project justification. They provide rationalisation for assumptions that we build into project design, and they give license for interpretations on the basis that overarching controls have already been established; e.g. &amp;#8220;It is well known that &amp;#8230;&amp;#8230; and therefore &amp;#8230;. &amp;#8220;. But tracing individual precepts back through the literature often reveals that in fact the variables in question have never been subject to rigorous testing or verifiable measurement.Examples of the impacts of these colonial narratives on modern science are widespread, and include over-interpretation of small amounts of data (e.g. short-term and/or small-scale measurements in areas of high erosion being extrapolated to represent regional or national erosion rates) as well as conclusions being formulated without perceived need to perform measurements or comparative analysis (e.g. inferring that because deforestation elsewhere has been linked elsewhere with erosion, tree removal in a study site must also have caused rapid and intense soil loss).This is not to say that humans do not cause erosion or landscape degradation. Damage that we do throughout the world is indisputably documented. But there is a clear imbalance in the way we measure and analyse geomorphic change, and&amp;#8212;particularly in the Global South&amp;#8212;there is a history of embedded assumptions, fed by strong implicit bias that indigenous and traditional land-use practices are inherently damaging. This means that many projects are (unintentionally) preconditioned to return results that will be in line with expectations set by the governing assumptions. Which of course strengthens those assumptions. To properly quantify and understand anthropogenic impacts on the landscape we must test all our embedded expectations. The colonial-era narrative of blame is pervasive and deeply entangled in our science. It is our job to learn to identify it and uproot it. And to avoid setting expectations in project design and analysis.

Modernist art and literature sought to engage with the ideas of different cultures without eradicating the differences between them. In Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense, Paul Stasi explores the relationship between high modernist aesthetic forms and structures of empire in the twentieth century. Stasi's text offers new readings of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf by situating their work within an early moment of globalization. By combining the insights of Marxist historiography, aesthetic theory and postcolonial criticism, Stasi's careful analysis reveals how these authors' aesthetic forms responded to, and helped shape, their unique historical moment. Written with a wide readership in mind, this book will appeal especially to scholars of British and American literature as well as students of literary criticism and postcolonial studies.

COSMOS AND COLONY Robert Spencer, Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; 240pp, hardback £50 A certain sense of malaise and exhaustion has been evident in Postcolonial Studies for some time now in terms of its strategic goals, with a host of commentators seeking to 'relocate' it, wondering when it was (past tense) or seeking its abolition. While the production of postcolonial literary criticism continues unabated, the theoretical orientations and political investments of both its proponents and opponents have changed little in the last decade or so. Robert Spencer attempts to inject a fresh sense of direction and urgency into the field by drawing on theories of 'cosmopolitanism', to promote both 'a defence of the moral and political efficacy of postcolonial writing' and to recuperate the reading of such texts as a means of 'fostering a sense of mutual obligation and even ... solidarity' between die western reader of such work and non-western constituencies which have suffered, and continue to suffer, the depredations of imperialism. Following figures like Walter Mignolo, 'cosmopolitanism' is seen to provide a potentially powerful critique of the discourses and processes of globalisation, which the author righdy sees as all too often providing a fig-leaf for new dispensations of imperialism in the contemporary world. There is much to admire about this text, the arguments of which deserve close attention. Its moral energy is refreshing, particularly in some finely outraged passages about the cant surrounding contemporary imperial adventures like the invasion of Iraq. It also offers a compelling call-to-arms on behalf of the idea of the efficacy of literary studies as one means, amongst others, towards the creation of a less unequal world-system. Spencer's premise is that a genuinely democratic, just and new 'New World Order,' to which 'cosmopolitanism' properly aspires, is 'a cultural as well as political undertaking and therefore entails not just the regulation of economic activity but also the re-imagining and even the invention of new and more meaningful forms of human relationship'. The author draws productively on an impressive range of cultural theory to scaffold his argument, including some figures, notably Paul Ricoeur, and even ER. Leavis, whose work has hitherto been under-utilised as a resource for postcolonial literary studies. His close readings of individual postcolonial texts are often penetrating and admirably attentive to issues of form as well as to thematic or political issues. Further, he convincingly demonstrates die value of drawing on a wider range of Said's writing than is customary in Postcolonial Studies - while also showing a commendable willingness to critique or supplement aspects of his mentor's diinking. Spencer also usefully reminds his readers that imperialism and colonialism are not the exclusive property of the West. As his chapter on Timothy Mo demonstrates, even recendy decolonised nations like Indonesia are prone to quickly pick up the bad habits of erstwhile European masters, a trend which is likely to increase as western power wanes. Yet Spencer's programme for a reinvigoration of postcolonial literary criticism is debatable in certain key respects. In the first place, his typology of 'cosmopolitanism' is over-schematic. He divides approaches to the discourse within Postcolonial Studies into three schools, the 'sceptical', the 'celebratory' and the 'socialist'. It's surprising to find Gayatri Spivak, whose substantial and complex oeuvre is summarised in Chapter 2 in a few brief lines, assigned to the first group, which is allegedly characterised by its investment in 'local identities and communities as the natural units of affiliation and action' and its lack of interest in 'the relationship between colonialism and capitalism'. This is not only simplistic as a description of the thrust of Spivak's work, but contradicted by Spencer's later praise for her promotion of 'transnational literacy' as an analogue of his own programme of 'cosmopolitanism. …

Drawing on postcolonial studies, hegemony theory, Marxian commodification, and previous critiques of Africa’s portrayal in colonial narratives, Western news, and tourism advertising, this qualitative study examines Africa’s representation through January 2008 on three U.S. network reality television programs: the CBS hits Survivor and The Amazing Race and the FOX talent contest American Idol in its “Idol Gives Back” fundraiser. Specifically, I ask whether representations reveal Africa’s continued colonization via commodification in three ways: by erasing or including African specificity, by relying on static voiceless images or allowing Africans agency, and by placing American visitors in varied hybrid encounter roles revealing their complicity with or resistance to colonial and neocolonial Western dominance. As cultural mixture is a central feature commodified in these programs, the postcolonial concept hybridity is a particularly useful analytic tool. The notion of “hybrid encounter” is proposed to more accurately describe the contact represented in the texts. I argue that Africa’s representation on reality television reveals old narrative patterns as well as new ways of commodifying the continent. The programs also reinforce Western political economic dominance at a time of greatly increased tourism to developing countries alongside global product advertising aligned with the trendy lifestyle values of adventure travel.

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism. Ed. by Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry for the English Association. Cambridge: Brewer. 2000. xi + 156 pp. 30 [pounds sterling]; $55. These seven essays, four on theory and method, three applying critical analysis to writers from the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, mark yet more additions to the ongoing soul-searching that has characterized postcolonial studies for the last decade at least. There is no such thing as a content postcolonialist these days it seems, other than possibly the figure who dissects the poverty of postcolonial critical approaches, to then collapse having justified why further analysis would be simply too much. Such concerns are legitimate of course. The heady rise of postcolonial studies in the last twenty years has undoubtedly been marked by analytical strategies guilty of neglecting key specifics of postcolonial praxis. Nevertheless, this emphasis on method has led to a considerable period in which much of the high-profile publishing on the subject has revolved around discussions of how best to approach the varying texts of the postcolonial. So when, in their introduction to this volume, Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry point out that postcolonial cultural studies have often adopted a culturalist approach that `bypasses a consideration of material conditions' (p. vii), they are reiterating an orthodoxy that has prevailed since the publication of a number of key interrogatory articles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chrisman and Parry must be congratulated for organizing a text that attempts to be more than only diagnostic. The essays on Kipling by Tim Watson, on Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson by Lawrence Phillips, and on Hanif Kureishi by Sukhdev Sandhu, are placed to work off the theoretical considerations of Vilashini Cooppan, Fernando Coronil, Gautam Premnath, and Ato Quayson that precede them. In truth, these later essays are the weakest part of the collection. Sandhu's somewhat swaggering account of Kureishi is idiosyncratic, but both Watson and Phillips struggle with the critical shape of their argument. Watson's account of Indian and Irish inflections in Kim contains the sort of historical and material detail Chrisman and Parry call for in their introduction, yet Watson's conclusion that Kipling's novel provides a `new fictive unity' for Empire, even as that unity accelerates `the pace at which the Empire helps to produce its own demise' (p. 111), is simply too critically neat. Phillips's examination of autobiography and illness in the nineteenth-century Pacific chooses a focus on what he terms the `seemingly chaotic sensual reality' (p. 119) of Stevenson's and London's travels. In fact, Phillips finds his texts perfectly free from chaos in marshalling his critical argument. Criticizing Rod Edmond's Representing the South Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for over-reading illness in the Pacific for its metaphoric content, Phillips contends such metaphors should be seen as `sites of discursive interchange' (p. …

Reviewed by: Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies Ashley Dawson MacPhee, Graham . 2011. Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. $100.00 hc. $32.00 sc. xviii + 180pp. Iremember meeting veteran radical intellectual and activist Stanley Aronowitz on the street during one of the massive anti-war marches that preceded the invasion of Iraq. Introduced by a friend as a colleague at the City University of New York, Aronowitz asked about my area of specialization. When I replied that I worked on postcolonial studies, Aronowitz barked back, "What's that? Aren't we in the middle of an imperial onslaught?" I mumbled something about how I hadn't chosen this disciplinary designation, before Aronowitz was diverted by a group of women sporting large missiles between their legs. My uncomfortable exchange raises a variety of issues germane to Graham MacPhee's recent Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Aside from sticky disciplinary questions, the appellation 'postcolonial' denotes a particular temporal trajectory that, as scholars such as Anne McClintock have noted, hardly characterizes most nations in the global South accurately, given the fresh waves of economic and military control to which such states have been subjected since winning independence. The falseness of this designation is equally true of a former imperial metropole such as Great Britain, which, although it has 'lost' almost all of its colonies, continues to play an important role in the global economy through the good offices of the City-based financial industry, and which, as a member of coalitions such as NATO, also continues to project military force around the globe. How then are we to theorize literary production in a nation such as Britain, which repeatedly seems to fall into the grip of imperial nostalgia, and yet whose embassies in countries like Iran and Afghanistan continue to be assaulted by angry demonstrations against imperialism? This is precisely the complex terrain that MacPhee's book surveys. Central to MacPhee's intervention is his reconciliation of two important, apparently contradictory scholarly analyses of postwar British literary production. In the case of Jed Esty, author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2003), Britain's withdrawal from empire following the Second World War brought with it a celebration of narrowly defined [End Page 162] English national culture—the sort of thing celebrated by T.S. Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), when he discussed English national character as constituted by enthusiasm for everything from "Derby Day and Henley Regatta" to "the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, and Wensleydale cheese" (quoted in MacPhee 2011, 85). By contrast, John Marx's The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (2005) argues that, as decolonization took place and the UK lost its dominant international position, British culture was integrated into a new global system centered on the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States. MacPhee's book finds a way to integrate these apparently paradoxical positions by arguing that Cold War discourse relied on both a "new doctrine of strategic defense" that depended on "a spatially discrete nation as the homeland in relation to which strategic resources or territories would be mapped," and an "abstract freedom" that "enjoys an unbounded and delocalized scope" (26). In other words, territorializing and deterritorializing logics overlapped with one another during the Cold War, leading to literary production that emphasized both national retrenchment and participation in US global hegemony. MacPhee supports this subtle analysis of the integration of Britain into what Peter Gowan calls the US-centered hub-and-spokes system of the Cold War era with astute readings of a variety of texts, from Graham Greene's The Quiet American to essays and speeches by Winston Churchill, George Orwell, and T.S. Eliot. The latter section of this first part of MacPhee's book also demonstrates the political and cultural impact of the new dispensation: once integrated into the new postwar world order, Britain could represent itself as innocent of its imperial history, despite the fact that the era from 1945 to 1967 saw the UK conduct brutal colonial wars in places such as Cyprus, Kenya, and Aden (now Yemen). This reimagined community could...

This in-depth comparative analysis embarks on a captivating journey into the exploration of human nature as depicted in two enduring literary masterpieces: William Golding's timeless Lord of the Flies and George Orwell's thought-provoking Animal Farm. Through a meticulous dissection of character interactions, allegorical motifs, and underlying themes, this study unveils the intricate ways in which both authors delve into the depths of human behavior and societal constructs. Golding's narrative plunges readers into the primal instincts that sur-face within a group of stranded boys, shedding light on the raw potential for violence and chaos inherent in humanity. Meanwhile, Orwell's allegorical farm animals serve as a lens through which to dissect the insidious influence of power and the erosion of ideals in the face of totalitarian regimes. As we delve further in-to the nuances of these literary works, we discover the distinct artistic lenses through which Golding and Orwell examine human nature. Golding's exploration of the fragility of order within a microcosm reflects the precarious balance be-tween civilization and savagery, while Orwell's satirical depiction unravels the mechanisms by which authority morphs into tyranny. This comparative analysis ultimately underscores the authors' unique yet complementary endeavors to illuminate the complexities of human behavior and the profound impact of societal structures. In doing so, it reaffirms the enduring significance of these narratives as windows into the human experience, resonating across time and culture.