최근 영국문화와 영국성의 재발견: 앤젤라 카터의 『현명한 아이들』

Abstract

Youngjoo KimThe recent discussions of English cultural studies have identified that the sense of national identity in the postwar Britain has been increasingly determined on the level of cultural production. The specifically postwar British achievement in fields of culture industry including critical theory, drama, film, music, and tourism has produced a certain form of Englishness that has been widely circulated, consumed, and reproduced both in domestic and international levels. The paper aims to examine the postwar British culture industry and the production of an ideology of English self-representation, which is registered strongly in the national past, by putting it in the historical context of the post-1945 decline of Britain as an economical, political, and imperial power. It further aims to explore the literary configuration of the national identity as it is presented in Angela Carter's Wise Children. Acutely aware of the postwar decline of Britain and the rise of the British culture industry, Carter takes a radical reappraisal in the novel of the production of an ideology of Englishness, an ideology that is invested in the cultural signifier of Shakespeare. Carter, interweaving the unofficial centennial genealogy of the Hazard family, the grand Shakespearean stage-dynasty and British history for a century and a half, evokes the past--both personal and national--only to present it as bits of pastiches that become explicitly the object of the narrative parody. In Wise Children, Carter parodies the pastiched past and the search for the authentic origin of identity. Carter's refusal to reify history and fall into nostalgia comes along with an envisioning of a new concept of Englishness that embraces not only the legitimate but also the illegitimate side of English culture and identity.