Life Writing and the End of Empire : Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives

The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War.Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to ‘go home’ to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives.By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker’s study asks what it means to be ‘at home’ in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai’s International Settlement.These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the