This critical engagement with some of the most prominent contemporary theorists of postcolonial studies reevaluates recent theories of hybridity and agency. Challenging the claim that hybridity provides a site of resistance to hegemonic and homogenizing forces in an increasingly globalized world, Anjali Prabhu pursues the ways in which hybridity plays out in the Creole, postcolonial societies of Mauritius and La Réunion, two small islands in the Indian Ocean, and offers an introduction to the literature and culture of this lesser-known region of Francophonie. She also reconsiders two major theorists from the Francophone context, Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, through a provocatively Marxian framing that reveals these two writers shared more in common about agency and society than has previously been recognized.

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.

What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future. This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.

Using three literary analyses to show what happens once we leave behind the theoretical poverty of celebratory readings of contemporary migration and hybridity literature, this book offers a way out of the theoretical deadlock of putting hybridity against purity or flux against fixity.

Engagements with Hybridity in Literature: An Introduction is a textbook especially for undergraduate and graduate students of literature. It discusses the different dimensions of the notion of hybridity in theory and practice, introducing the use and relevance of the concept in literary studies. As a structured and up-to-date source for both instructors and learners, it provides a fascinating selection of materials and approaches. The book examines the concept of hybridity, offers a historical overview of the term and its critique, and draws upon the key ideas, trends, and voices in the field. It critically engages with the theoretical, intellectual, and literary discussions of the concept from the time of colonialism to the postmodern era and beyond. The book enables students to develop critical thinking through engaging them in case studies addressing a diverse selection of literary texts from various genres and cultures that open up new perspectives and opportunities for analysis. Each chapter offers a specific theoretical background and close readings of hybridity in literary texts. To improve the students’ analytical skills and knowledge of hybridity, each chapter includes relevant tasks, questions, and additional reference materials.

Offers a lucid introduction to postcolonial studies, one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies.

The concept of hybridity highlights complex processes of interaction and transformation between different institutional and social forms, and normative systems. It has been used in numerous ways to generate important analytical and methodological insights into peacebuilding and development. Its most recent application in the social sciences has also attracted powerful critiques that have highlighted its limitations and challenged its continuing usage. This book examines whether the value of hybridity as a concept can continue to be harnessed, and how its shortcomings might be mitigated or overcome. It does so in an interdisciplinary way, as hybridity has been used as a benchmark across multiple disciplines and areas of practical engagement over the past decade – including peacebuilding, state-building, justice reform, security, development studies, anthropology, and economics. This book encourages a dialogue about the uses and critiques of hybridity from a variety of perspectives and vantage points, including deeply ethnographic works, high-level theory, and applied policy work. The authors conclude that there is continued value in the concept of hybridity, but argue that this value can only be realised if the concept is engaged with in a reflexive and critical way. This book was originally published as a special issue of the online journal Third World Thematics.

Forms of Engagement sheds light on questions of poetic form in women's poetry. It traces the influences on the work of Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, and Margaret Cavendish, allowing readers to understand better both how women composed their poems and how they engaged with their contemporaries.

The period in which we live is marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters of all kinds. However we react to it, the global trend towards mixing or hybridization is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu, ‘Bollywood’ films or salsa or reggae music. Some people celebrate these phenomena, whilst others fear or condemn them. No wonder, then, that theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Ien Ang, have engaged with hybridity in their work and sought to untangle these complex events and reactions; or that a variety of disciplines now devote increasing attention to the works of these theorists and to the processes of cultural encounter, contact, interaction, exchange and hybridization. In this concise book, leading historian Peter Burke considers these fascinating and contested phenomena, ranging over theories, practices, processes and events in a manner that is as wide-ranging and vibrant as the topic at hand.

This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) serve as striking examples for this discussion, for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography. This book critically reconsiders the claims and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an inherently interdisciplinary framework, this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses, genres, disciplines, and media, this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way, drawing on hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing Sebald within postwar literature in German, the book is the first English-language study to consider Sebald's œuvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.