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Decolonization and the Second World War

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Post-War British Literature and the "End of Empire"

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Abstract

This chapter identifies a denunciation of the racial hierarchies and imperial confidence of imperial ‘adventure tales’ in works by Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Gerald Hanley, and Alan Sillitoe. I examine how novels produced by Golding and Hanley use the presence of Holocaust consciousness as a platform to challenge notions of British racial and cultural superiority. In doing so, they challenge the imperial dichotomy of European civilization and colonial savagery. To conclude the chapter, I analyse two distinct responses to independence in an often-neglected former colony of the British Empire. Burgess and Sillitoe depict the success of anti-colonial nationalism in Malaysia (formerly Malaya) and self-consciously oppose established depictions of the region as an exotic, romanticized space.

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  1. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Matthew Whittle

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Whittle, M. (2016). Decolonization and the Second World War. In: Post-War British Literature and the "End of Empire". Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54014-0_2

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