TY - JOUR
T1 - Quartet in autumn and the meaning of barbara pym
AU - Burton, Antoinette
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author/s.
PY - 2021/6/1
Y1 - 2021/6/1
N2 - Barbara Pym’s fiction has been viewed as an anthropological approach to the social mores of postwar Britain. In this article, I use one of her last novels, Quartet in Autumn, to sharpen that reading to think through how Pym articulated an aesthetics of decline by trumpeting the dying world of the White English spinster. Quartet fictionalizes the agony of what Ramon Soto-Crespo calls “decapitalized Whiteness,” that is, where economic loss and a sense of racial disenfranchisement go hand in hand. The transatlantic desire it satisfied for a world that was lost yet redeemable through good old-fashioned English “women’s” literature prefigures the nostalgia for a preglobal Britain that has underwritten much of Brexit’s affective appeal.
AB - Barbara Pym’s fiction has been viewed as an anthropological approach to the social mores of postwar Britain. In this article, I use one of her last novels, Quartet in Autumn, to sharpen that reading to think through how Pym articulated an aesthetics of decline by trumpeting the dying world of the White English spinster. Quartet fictionalizes the agony of what Ramon Soto-Crespo calls “decapitalized Whiteness,” that is, where economic loss and a sense of racial disenfranchisement go hand in hand. The transatlantic desire it satisfied for a world that was lost yet redeemable through good old-fashioned English “women’s” literature prefigures the nostalgia for a preglobal Britain that has underwritten much of Brexit’s affective appeal.
KW - Brexit
KW - Decapitalized Whiteness
KW - Gender and racial disenfranchisement
KW - Literary reputation
KW - Little Englandism
KW - Postwar women’s fiction
KW - Structure of feeling
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U2 - 10.3167/hrrh.2020.470204
DO - 10.3167/hrrh.2020.470204
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85109180191
SN - 0315-7997
VL - 47
SP - 36
EP - 48
JO - Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
JF - Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
IS - 2
ER -