With a language, landscape and culture unfamiliar to the majority of British readers, Latin America is a puzzling and anomalous presence in British modernist fiction. Yet, in the work of Conrad, Lawrence and Lowry it is also a setting that constitues a minor tradition in its own right and one that offers a distorted reflection of the concerns an anxieties back home: from uncertainties over the future of the British Empire to the traumatic recogntion of loss that attended the First and Second World Wars. In addition to these political and historical concerns, the representation of Latin America in British modernist fiction is also entangled with a corresponding crisis of culture. Consistently Latin America offers itself to writers in English as a suitable correlative to concerns which range from disturbing visions of the natural worls to the disorientation that attended the engagement with the culturally unfamiliar along with the uncertainties that were related to the emergence of a truly global economy in which Britain modernist fiction is far from static. As this interest in Latin America matures, there is a progressive movement from the initial sense of doubt (Conrad) along with a contrary sense of desperation (Lawrence) towards a final sense of resignation (Lowry). As such, Latin America can be thought of as a fictional space in the British modernist novel - in the end, more of a fantasy than a reality - that reflects the frightening apprehension of a new world in which British fiction had found a suitable place to come to terms with some of its deepest fears and anxieties.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:589073 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Funge, Benjamin Peter |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/47175/ |
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