UC Irvine

This dissertation situates twentieth-century British literature within a larger historical discourse of place and identity, especially as articulated in urban planning and architecture. In the twentieth century, planning emerged as a practice of hegemonic and colonial power within Britain as well as internationally. In analyzing these discourses, this dissertation argues against criticism that would set such hegemonic power in strict opposition to the local; in fact, through planning and its notion of place, such power could make profound claims to locality and particularity. This larger context informs readings of postwar and contemporary British writers, from the materially-focused poetry of Roy Fisher and Ian Hamilton Finlay, to the juxtapositions of provinciality and migration in the work of Caryl Phillips, and finally to the encounters with marginalized dismalness in the fiction of and Rachel Trezise.