Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (review)

Peter J. Kalliney's book offers a lucid and timely re-engagement with the treatment of class in twentieth-century English fiction. He draws on previous approaches to the study of class in literature but states his own position as an interest in the way twentieth-century English fiction "consistently mobilizes class politics as a way of theorizing social difference and imagining political agency in a rapidly changing cultural context," and that the "tension between class as a material condition and class as an ideological disposition becomes manifest through symbolic apparatuses, such as literary texts" (4). He also makes the case for the specificity of the English class system and the impact it has had, through literature, on both the imperial project of the early twentieth century and the subsequent re-assessment of discourses of Englishness in later texts. In six chapters Kalliney undertakes fascinating close analyses of a number of twentieth-century writers including Forster, Waugh and Woolf from the pre-war period, and Sillitoe, Lessing, and Rushdie from the 1950s onwards.

The first main chapter establishes Kalliney's methodological approach in engaging analyses of E. M. Forster's Howards End and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, while Chapter 3 offers an excellent reading of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway drawing on an Althusserian model of ideology. In the latter analysis, Kalliney emphasizes the way in which Woolf celebrates the vibrancy of 1920s London set against the city's manifestations of a pre-First World War imperial legacy, which "constitutes an attempt to disentangle what is wonderful about London from an imperialist, hierarchical, patriarchal Britain" (77). This is achieved through Woolf's use of modernist narrative techniques, whereby characters offer contrasting representations of London. This shifting narrative perspective establishes Kalliney's deployment of an Althusserian model of ideology in his reading of the novel, whereby "the process of identifying ideology is predicated on ironic interpretive strategies in which reading subjects are quick to identify another's ideological illusions while remaining unable to recognize the ideological parameters of their own subjectivity" (80). This approach remains implicit in Kalliney's readings of most of the novels in the book, and although he does not address theoretical positions that might be described as post-ideological, his concerns with offering readings based on class warrant this return of ideology. The chapter on Mrs Dalloway also offers an interesting reading of the liminal, urban-rural space of London parks. This forms a hinge to his shorter reading of Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners in which the park is seen as a space in which Britain's imperial past is evoked by way of various monuments and "exotic" signifiers, while at the same time providing an area which offers egalitarian encounters of differing classes and ethnicities. Kalliney's reading of The Lonely Londoners emphasizes the way in which Selvon's writing does not reject modernist experimentation, as he argues much other 1950s writing does, but reconfigures it as a formal method of postcolonial critique. As Kalliney writes, "Postcolonial literature seizes the aesthetic territories and spaces charted by metropolitan modernism" (107). This focus on the formal techniques deployed in postcolonial writing also informs his readings of Doris Lessing's In Pursuit of the English in Chapter 5, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in Chapter 6.

Chapter 4 provides an interesting discussion of the relationship between domesticity and class in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Kalliney argues that the texts produced by Angry writers in the late 1950s tended to present an ambivalent attitude to class consciousness, and although his claim that "most people in England took it for granted that class differences were rapidly, ineluctably disintegrating" (113) is too much of a generalization, his central point that "Angry texts continually pose the fact of relative material security against the affect of class...