ABSTRACT
The problematic character of historical time continues in the metamodern fiction of Alan Hollinghurst. In his work as a novelist, Hollinghurst has chosen to take James and Woolf along with other modernists such as Marcel Proust, the camp novelist Ronald Firbank, and Evelyn Waugh as models. The fascination that Hollinghurst shows with cross-racial sexual contacts between black and white men and youths can, however, be put to work in imagining a line of individual and minority progress despite the contested trajectory of national existence. One of Hollinghurst’s main topics has been the presence and suppression of British African and Afro-Caribbean linkages in the life and history of the United Kingdom. In Britain in the post-War period, anti-black prejudice has repeatedly distorted both everyday existence and national politics. Hollinghurst has long shown interest in intimacies between white men and men of color in England.
