Introduction: Foreign Fields that are Forever England

Abstract

‘To me, England is the country, and the country is England’, Stanley Baldwin stirringly declared during his speech to the Royal Society of St. George in London on 6 May 1924. Baldwin’s patriotic nostalgia, expressed in the belief that an unchanging rural England serves as ‘the gifts of that great English race’, may appear anachronistically mawkish today (Baldwin, 2012, 95–6). Yet a powerful, if quiet, strain of his élan continues to resonate and reside in national life in the early twenty-first century, a palpable force that is neither innocuous nor free from historical entanglements. One of the central aims of The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature concerns the material histories underlying such sentiments, histories that are at once international and colonial, lying well beyond the village verge and the borders of England’s green and pleasant land. The residual effects of these imperial histories not only subtly bear on contemporary race relations in Britain but also indirectly impinge on the lives of marginalised communities across the vast spaces of the British ex-colonies. More particularly, this book centres on literary representations of the polyvalent and overlapping meanings of ‘the country’ within the global legacy of British colonialism: as the rural in England and in the ex-colonies and as predominantly rural nations from a world systems perspective. It explores the ‘postcolonial country’ as encompassing all of these diverse meanings and discursive sites through a range of contemporary texts drawn from different geographies and genres. This constellation of texts portrays the politics underlying the postcolonial country as crucial not only to constructing national consciousness, but also to determining self-identity within a globalised, postcolonial world.KeywordsLiterary TextContemporary LiteratureRural SpaceWorld System TheoryPostcolonial StudyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.