Fictional Country Houses of the 1980s: Isabel Colegate, Kazuo Ishiguro, and V.S. Naipaul.

This article examines the renewed literary interest in English country houses during the 1980s through three novels: Isabel Colegate's *The Shooting Party* (1980), Kazuo Ishiguro's *The Remains of the Day* (1988), and V. S. Naipaul's *The Enigma of Arrival* (1987). It argues that these works critically engage with the myth of the English country house by exploring its social, political, and imperial histories, including colonial and postcolonial perspectives often omitted in nostalgic portrayals. Colegate, writing from an upper-class background, Ishiguro, a British writer of East Asian descent, and Naipaul, a Caribbean-born British author, each incorporate multiple viewpoints—especially those of servants and outsiders—to challenge idealized images of Englishness and heritage. Their novels anticipate twenty-first-century scholarly reassessments of country houses as sites intertwined with empire, class, and cultural identity.