This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Google Scholar Articles by Sizemore, C. W. Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

In Pursuit of the English: Hybridity and the Local in Doris Lessing's First Urban Text

Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

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.

Key Words: Lessing • In Pursuit of the English • feminism • hybridity • local cosmopolitanism • London • postcolonialism • working class

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?