Abstract
Themes of authentication and displacement explored by Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, a novel later refigured by W. Somerset Maugham in his The Razor’s Edge, have been adapted by V.S. Naipaul in Half a Life. The novels combine to produce an intertextual discourse concerning the post-colonial product of England’s imperialistic appetite that dominated much of the world over the past three centuries. The tangled links between the three books, and particularly Naipaul’s examination of the imbricated layers of self-authentication and imperialism that inform James and Maugham, are the focus of my study.
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