Nevertheless, like such fictional world-controllers and corporate moguls from Aldous Huxley's Mustapha Mond in Brave New World to Alan Sillitoe's Claude Moggerhanger in A Start in Life and Life Goes On, Sir Jack remains more a caricature than a character, ultimately unconvincing. Max is a cultural historian, trendily theoretical of course, with a lucrative sideline as a television pundit.

Sir Jack's fortune is based on multinational media conglomerates, modeled presumably on those of Rupert Murdoch and/or Robert Maxwell Dr. Max are twenty-first- century counterparts of Noddy Boffin and Silas Wegg in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend: a corporate philistine and his well-paid academic sycophant. Sir Jack Pitman and his historian-henchman Dr. There, without the inconvenience of time- and money-wasting travel between the authentic if ill-kempt or otherwise inconvenient locales, affluent tourists - or 'throughput' as they are known in corporate-speak - can, for example, view replicas of the White Cliffs of Dover in the early morning light, catch the Changing of the Guard at 'Buck House' before noon, have lunch with Samuel Johnson at the Cheshire Cheese, take in the Battle of Britain during the afternoon, and recover from the London blitz before dinner. Julian Barnes's darkly satiric new novel England, England projects this trend into a not-so-distant (but definitely post-Elizabeth II) future, when a corporate mogul, Sir Jack Pitman, decides to construct a quintessence-of-English site that will put facsimiles of all the major tourist attractions (identified of course through polling and focus groups) into one convenient location, located on what is now the Isle of Wight.

European critics contended that a tourist Mecca like Venice seemed in danger of becoming less a living city than a theme park by the sea subsequently, the establishment of EuroDisney came to represent a triumph of the faux. In his book's third chapter, Boorstin proposed that traditional travel and exploration had been supplanted by tourism, with its emphasis on commercial exploitation, packaging, uniformity, and standardization. Boorstin in The Image (1962) described the growing displacement of 'authentic' aspects of culture and its postmodern replacement by the 'image,' the replica, the 'pseudo-event,' and the inauthentic. Long before Jean Baudrillard expounded the prevalence of simulacra in the postmodern world, Daniel J.

MLA style: 'England, England.' The Free Library.

England england by julian barnes