Britishers at home and overseas, imperial and colonial identity in the work of Grant Allen, Robert Barr and Sir Gilbert Parker

Abstract

After spending their formative years in Canada, Grant Allen (1848-99), Robert Barr (1850-1912) and Sir Gilbert Parker (1860-1932) all established successful literary careers in Great Britain, where they spoke for as well as to both the imperial heartland and the colonial hinterland. Reading Allen, Barr and Parker through the lens of postcolonial theory reveals a wide range of strategies for dealing with the complex negotiations integral to this situation. Many of their protagonists embody a national identity distinct from, and yet congruent with, that of Great Britain, although they are also depicted as shunning identification with aboriginal peoples, non-British immigrants and women, all marginalized by the colonial experience. The consequent interplay between imperial and colonial representations produces distinctive hybrid formations and fraught transitions in their work, as the process of alternately recognizing and sublimating these difficulties generates characteristic textual tensions and anxieties.

Constructions of personal and social identity, as well as to the extent to which Allen, Barr and Parker resist or comply with Britain's imperial enterprise, are approached through concepts of hybridization and appropriation that foreground the cultural complexity of their position. Allen, Barr and Parker are examined as both agents and subjects of the imperial impulse, and are in particular considered with regard to the possible formation of a "settler identity" in between the colonial and imperial positions. Since Allen, Barr and Parker have been largely ignored by scholars, issues of canonization and reception are also addressed, as is the question of their historical contextualization in the fields of Canadian and English literary history. This investigation of a relatively neglected area of postcolonial theory also participates in the ongoing reevaluation of the "transitional" or "Edwardian" developments that both link and separate the Victorian and Modernist literary eras.