Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-05(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Joe Cleary.

"The World-Historical Novel" is a story about how a genre changes scale. It studies the ways in which the British historical novel was transformed across the twentieth century as it struggled to engage with the complex flows of global capital and anti-colonial revolutionary movements that emerged in the long collapse of British empire. It shows how writers like Joseph Conrad, C.L.R. James, T.E. Lawrence, David Mitchell and Caryl Phillips sought to expand the limits of the historical novel by incorporating it with genres as varied as romance, epic, satire and science fiction. I argue that these experiments have led to a new kind of historical novel that unlike its nineteenth-century counterpart evinces a skeptical attitude to historical progress. These texts show how the revolutions of the world's margins, unlike the European revolutions of 1848, did not secure liberal democracy and national sovereignty, but produced compromised and frustrated histories.

This project, then, tells of how a particular genre, the historical novel, defied the nationalistic contraction that characterized much of British literary history in the twentieth century. These texts chart a countermovent to that history, in which the decline of empire did not see literary imagination retreat into the newly circumscribed national territory but journey outwards to tell the stories of the imperial world-system, its collapse and the postcolonial world that replaced it.