World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels
World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels
Author(s): Anna Branach-KallasSubject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics
Published by: Instytut Anglistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Summary/Abstract: This article offers a comparative analysis of the representation of travelling men and women in The Sojourn (2003) by Canadian writer Alan Cumyn, The Daughters of Mars (2012) by Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally and Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (2014) by North American indigenous author Gerald Vizenor. These three novels explore the cliché of colonial loyalties, illustrating the diverse motivations that led individuals from North America and Australia to volunteer for the war. Cumyn, Kenneally and Vizenor undermine the stereotypical location of the colonial traveller in an uncultured space; in their fiction the war provides a pretext to expose imperial ideologies, to redefi ne collective identities, as well as to rethink the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan. As a result, the First World War is reconfigured in terms of border crossing, contact and/or transcultural exchange, which result in radical shifts in consciousness, a critique of imperialism, as well as aspirations for cultural/political autonomy.
Journal: ANGLICA - An International Journal of English Studies
- Issue Year: 27/2018
- Issue No: 3
- Page Range: 183-200
- Page Count: 18
- Language: English