Heritage Fictions: The Country-House Novel, Preservation, and the New Britain

<p>This project investigates how novels from <italic>Howards End</italic> (1910) to <italic>The Stranger's Child</italic> (2011), in revisiting the English country house, reveal the centrality of preservationism to twentieth-century British identity. According to most critics, this site grows increasingly anachronistic as the century progresses, a repository for that which is considered out of time in English culture. Against this view, I demonstrate that the continual literary repurposing of the country house constitutes it as a key setting for appropriation and experimentation, as well as for the critique of outmoded ideologies, rather than the mere commemoration thereof. By attending to the transformations of fictional country houses, this dissertation traces a literary history of twentieth-century Britain adjacent to but distinct from critical narratives of its developing diversification, as well as of its declining grandeur. This history illuminates how contemporary characterizations of an urbanizing, multicultural Britain work to confine many of the legacies of imperialism to a pastoral past, rather than engaging with their still resonant echoes today.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English and American Literature

Year dc:date.available

2014

Author dc:creator

• Henderson, Katherine Claire

Contributors dc:contributor

• J. Dillon Brown

Language dc:language

English (en)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7936/K73R0QZ0

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:openscholarship.wustl.edu:etd-2307