From Texas to Rome : Fighting World War II and the Italian Campaign With the 36th Infantry Division

The present study aims to explore the country estate as a site for imagining "Englishness" in the intersection of history and culture. Concentrating on country-house fiction, my project seeks to draw conclusions about the way in which twentieth-century novels, in particular, are concerned with constructing and conversing with a vision of the national past. Informed by theoretical considerations such as those of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha addressing the link between nations and narrations, as well as Benedict Anderson's conception of a nation as an "imagined community," I argue that England's national past is an imaginary object, constantly reinvented and reconfigured from the perspective of the present. Situating the country-house novel in relation to its historical specificity enables me to chart the chosen texts' thematic and formal complexities as a response to dramatic changes---social, political, cultural and literary---throughout the century. While earlier novels tend to represent the country-estate landscape as symbolic of a disappearing heritage, later works problematize these representations, questioning definitions of England and Englishness. I consider to what extent these often ambivalent works perpetuate an idealized, nostalgic England of the imagination, as well as how they undermine myths of Englishness, provoking questions about national identity, class and gender relations, and the country-house genre itself. As cultural historians have proposed that it is around the turn of the century, when the authority of the aristocracy is waning and urbanization appears to threaten the countryside, that the worship of the aestheticized country house takes hold, I begin my study at this point. My first chapter establishes a literary and cultural framework for the country-house tradition and then situates three early twentieth-century novels within this framework: H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay (1908), E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934). Chapter Two discusses Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) as a text that calls attention to how the past is known and represented as it critiques Englishness, war, and empire and revises concepts of history and historiography. Chapter Three examines Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), a novel reflecting the impact of the Second World War as it nostalgically evokes the securities of an imagined past from the point of view of wartime's upheaval, and Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948), a text that complicates and enlarges the scope of the country-house genre through its contrasting depictions of an Irish "big house" and an English country manor during World War Two. Chapter Four analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) and V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) as responding to the heritage industry's fetishization of the country estate in Thatcherite Britain. While Ishiguro's novel scrutinizes the nostalgic cult of the country house, reworking the nation's myths, Naipaul fuses autobiography with fiction, locating the colonial/postcolonial subject in imbricated discourses of empire and Englishness. In the final chapter, I read Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) as a metafictional work that converses with the country-house tradition, self-reflexively highlighting the narrative process. Calling attention to the constructedness of all fictions, McEwan demystifies national myths while critiquing a damaging class system.