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The Novel: The Empire Writes Back

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

The Empire Writes Back

The Novel

BBC News - The Novel, The Empire Writes Back

The final episode examines the British Empire within storytelling.

The final episode of the series examines how the British Empire was celebrated in the novels of some writers and taken apart and upended by others.

Using performed readings and with contributions from contemporary novelists the series explores the ideas and emotions that novels continue to bring to their readers. The final episode of the series examines how the British Empire was often taken as a given and widely celebrated in novels of some writers, though in others - such as Rudyard Kipling's espionage yarn Kim - it was deeply questioned. Fifty years later, a different type of spy, James Bond, fought to keep the empire going when it had already gone. By the 1950s a new voice had emerged - that of novelists from the newly independent former British colonies, such as Nigeria's Chinua Achebe. The twin evils of racism and slavery come full circle in recent works such Malorie Blackman's series Noughts and Crosses and The Sellout, a savage comedy by Paul Beatty - in which a present-day African-American Los Angeleno keeps a slave. The power of novels past and present continues to move and to delight readers all around the world.

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