ABSTRACT
The Coda inspects the lineages of the Wellsian utopia in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes. Their dystopian scenarios bewail a world without England. While English autonomy, individuality, memory, and history abdicate, foreign authority and interest prevail. Additionally, English pastoral dissipates into an irredeemable solipsism, English continuity translates into path dependency, and the idiom of English character breaks up with the arrival of a female protagonist. The growing failures of national discourse lay bare England’s own unresolved problems of land tenure, mediatized institutional spectacle, and ritualized supremacies. English emancipatory legacies have yet to produce a saturating effect, which will have propelled England from its displaced discursive existence into its place-specific self.
