Hybridity, Code-Switching, and Identity in Modern and Contemporary British Fiction: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Maugham and Hornby

This study endeavours to examine the role of hybridity, code-switching and identity in the works of W. Somerset Maugham and Nick Hornby in terms of how the authors depict characters in postcolonial and contemporary British society. The paper focuses on the role of language as a medium of bargaining cultural borders and identity production in multicultural societies. Based on postcolonial theories by Homi Bhabha, and sociolinguistic approaches, this paper looks into how the above authors borrow the concept of hybridity and code-switching in an attempt to solve the problems of cultural assimilation, belonging and how viable or complicated the process of identity formation can be. Comparative research on Of Human Bondage and The Razor's Edge and Hornby's High Fidelity and About a Boy allows us to show how the characters presented by Maugham, before and after the Second World War, sought their way in a world of cross-cultural conflicts and identity crises. It can be concluded that hybridity and code-switching are important narrative devices in describing the struggles of identity in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, as they provide knowledge of the lack of fixedness of identity in modern-day multicultural Britain. The implications of language in the construction of identity are also used in the paper, especially in globalization, migration, and the exchange of cultures.