The Obsolete Empire - Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature

Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community.

Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies Association

The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers-Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul-to trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them.

Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they