Walking in London: The fiction of Neil Bartlett, Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst

Abstract

This thesis examines the fiction of Neil Bartlett, Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst, considering how they write missing voices of sexuality, gender and class back into history through re-imagining the city space. It examines the ways in which traditional, linear narratives and the notion of objectivity in historical discourse are challenged when history is presented through fiction.Waters, Bartlett and Hollinghurst are writing the past from the perspective of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, both employing and subverting traditional narrative genres. They all depict London as a symbolic, liminal space which allows for the voices of marginalized groups to flourish. Their London is a physical but also an imagined city, both grand and squalid, where the official boundaries between public and private space are often blurred.Through depicting their protagonists mapping their own ways around London, the authors all disrupt and destabilize traditional accounts of past events and city dwellers, foregrounding the imagination in the re-telling of history‘s excluded stories.