National Identity and a Literary Canon in British Tradition of the 20th Century

Abstract

The author of the article investigates the problem of a literary canon changing in the situation of installing the multilingual writers’ texts into literary tradition. The texts under consideration are the literary and publicistic works by Joseph Rudyard Kipling and John Robert Fowles, the writers acknowledged classical beyond Britain but appreciated as the mass literature authors in the United Kingdom. The paper aims at revealing the reasons and the consequences of installing the Rudyard Kipling’s and John Fowles’s texts into the literary canon, and at defining how the multilingualism and multiculturalism of these writers is connected with their interpretation of the notions of “Englishness” and “Britishness.” Anglo-Indian Kipling’s axiological priorities are the hierarchy of the text characters depending on their national and cultural characteristics and creating the unique author’s multicultural mythology. The key axiological principle of Fowles is understanding of the priority of French culture over the English one and creating the specific sample of an ideal representative of “Englishness,” who is the cosmopolitan lonely rebel with a strong artistic sense. Fowles’s national and cultural identity is shown in his stories and novels with the communicative fragments in different languages to create a very complex multicultural conceptual landscape, often ironical.