Space of postimperial dwelling: Metropolitan life and colonial history in Kate Pullinger's fiction

In When the Monster Dies (91989) and The Last Time I Saw Jane (1996), Kate Pullinger offers richly postcolonial and distinctly Canadian visions of Lon don. She portrays the former imperial metropolis as the hub of a dense web of temporal and spatial relations--to its local and overseas histories, to the 'foreign lands of its empire, and to 'others' both inside and outside c ity limits. London's multiple (post)imperial connections enable Pullinger t o explore questions of place and home, of race and identity, and of the ind ividual's relation to personal and ancestral histories. Reimagining London as a transnational palimpsest, she presents a corresponding model for the e xpatriate self.