In Pursuit of the English
Hybridity and the Local in Doris Lessing's First Urban Text
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9003293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christine W Sizemore (Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 133-144 |
| Publication date | 2008-05-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989408091236 |
| OpenAlex | W2116460448 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 8 |
The narrator of In Pursuit of the English brings a postcolonial, hybrid and feminist standpoint to her “ethnography” of the Notting Hill district of London in this semi-autobiographical account of Lessing's arrival in London from Rhodesia in 1949. “Doris”, as the narrator is known, says she is pursuing two “grails”: “England” and “the Working-Class”, but she has to give up both universalist concepts of England as an “imagined community” and the socialist cosmopolitanism of an undifferentiated working class. She instead discovers the local cosmopolitanism of the neighbourhood of Notting Hill and learns from her female friends how to centre herself in one district and navigate paths through the city. As she travels through the district of Notting Hill, she brings her experience of Africa into her observations of her new space and uses that hybrid and feminist vision to map the neighbourhood and create a snapshot of a culture of London in the 1940s and 1950s
Aesthetics · Art · Cosmopolitanism · Ethnography · Hybridity · Neighbourhood (mathematics · Political science · Politics · Snapshot (computer storage · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Thomas Hardy Literature Studies · Travel Writing and Literature
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,09 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2015 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |