ABSTRACT
The treatment of foreignness in university fiction is a touchstone of this attitude. Two positions are possible. An uninterrogated notion of Englishness makes foreigners at best comic, at worst dangerous. Foreigners can be dangerous, like the senior wartime French Quisling who masqueraded as a French Canadian scholar in post-war Oxford in order to evade just retribution, and murdered to keep his secret safe. Foreigners can think themselves dangerous, but be merely comic. There are degrees of foreignness. Foreigners bring dangers for English universities, generating a cruel paradox. The process of incorporating foreigners threatens the sanctity of English culture’s citadel. The solution is to restrict the flow of foreigners to a trickle small enough to be acculturated by conventional means. Foreigners are usually successfully socialized in Oxbridge and the mark of success is deference. Foreigners are not aliens in melting-pot north America.
