Written Orders

Written Orders is an innovative focused study of four writers whose careers coincided with the decline of the British Empire from apogee to dissolution. Each adapts the realist novel form to reflect his personal engagement with the crisis in colonial authority and the crisis in the legitimating discourses of colonialism. Leonard Woolf, deploying a form of proto-magical realism, executes an act of imaginative compensation for the limitations of Western rational discourse in the representation of local life. George Orwell satirizes the smugness of the conventional Empire novel to destabilize notions of Eurocentric superiority. Anthony Burgess turns to farce in an attempt to make sense of the period of chaos during Malaysian decolonization. Lloyd Fernando responds to Malaysian decolonization by appropriating modernist techniques to fashion a vision of postcolonial optimism. Written Orders is accessible to anyone interested in colonial and postcolonial writing. It will be of particular interest to those studying instances of resistance in fiction to the discourse of colonialism.