Happy in the Mother Country: Liminality in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

Abstract

Liminality theory remains underused in discussions of post World War II Caribbean writing in the UK. This essay re-considers Samuel Selvon’s seminal 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners through the lens of liminality. In this essay, liminality is used as a lens through which the novel’s characters, structure, locations, and language are viewed. The Lonely Londoners emerges as the prototypical liminal text, with each of its elements occupying an interstitial space between modernist experiment and a postcolonial alternative—or challenge to imperialist fictions.