World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels

• Authors: Branach-Kallas Anna

Abstracts

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 reconfi gured 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.

Keywords

EN

The Great War; colonial loyalties; cosmopolitanism; Indigenous writing; Alan Cumyn; Thomas Kenneally; Gerald Vizenor; cultural memory

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Warszawski. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2018
• Issue: 27/3
• Pages: 183-200

Contributors

author

Branach-Kallas Anna

• Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń

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