The extensive historical context and cultural significance of the English country house, along with its multifaceted meanings, lends itself to scholarly discussions surrounding nostalgia. This latter provides a crucial lens through which the English country house can be viewed and reinterpreted. In the context of nostalgic revisiting of a British imperial past in modern times, a critical perspective is necessary. Hence, the current study aims to further contribute to the growing body of research exploring imperial connections to the country house. It aims to demonstrate how the process of subverting the country house further challenges sanitised visions of this microcosm of Englishness and British Empire through fostering a reflective nostalgia approach. By focusing on narratives in which the house appears predominantly in a state of decline, the study argues that such portrayals resist conventional visions of stability and continuity, instead, they offer more opportunity to critique, rather than perpetuate, myths about Britain’s contentious past. Through close analysis of three notable country house narratives: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and its 1993 film adaptation, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and its 2007 adaptation, and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) alongside its 2018 adaptation, the study explores how these texts and films collectively deconstruct the traditional image of the country house. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the film adaptations, in their divergences from the source novels, reframe and further emphasise the critique embedded within the novels. Read together, the adaptations and their predecessor texts illustrate how the country house can be repurposed not as a site for nostalgic longing but as a locus for reflective engagement with the legacies of Empire, class structures, and national identity.
- Nostalgia, The English country house, British Empire, Englishness.
Nostalgia as Critique: Re-reading Contemporary English Country House Fictions and their Cinematic Adaptations Through a Reflective Nostalgia Lens
Benia, S. (Author). 2026
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis