Combining analysis with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book assesses how postcolonial writers respond to their own reception and niche positioning, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, within a global marketplace.

Internationally recognized for its superior scholarship, Modern Fiction Studies was one of the first journals to publish articles on postcolonial studies. Since postcolonialism's inception, scholars have defined, clarified, and enriched its conceptions and theoretical development in the pages of MFS. This anthology collects the best and most important articles on postcolonial literary studies published in MFS in the past thirty years. Postcolonial Literary Studies brings together groundbreaking scholarship focusing on significant works of fiction by such writers as Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and more. The essays feature ideas that helped shape the discipline from its earliest stages to the present and represent some of the finest examples of literary, theoretical, historical, and cultural criticism. With its focus on literary figures and texts, rather than solely on theory, this volume fills a significant gap in the fields of postcolonialism, global studies, and literary criticism in general. This rich collection of essays by the field’s leading scholars will prove indispensable to instructors and students across a broad spectrum of humanistic studies. It not only highlights the development and transformation of postcolonial literary study but also, by mapping out new directions of study, considers its continual significance and expansion.

Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis.

This deeply engaging, historically, and culturally informed book provides new perspectives on a wide range of writers, and at the same time provides a radically new development of many of the most pertinent issues in the field of postcolonial writing and theory. It constitutes a major new engagement between the "postcolonial" and a conception of the literary that is richly innovative in its deployment of psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and other approaches to the text. The book begins with some brief background to the issue of decolonization and its contemporary effects. It is informed throughout by a clear sense of literary and political context, within which chosen texts--by well-known writers (Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite) as well as less well-known ones (Joan Riley, Susan Power, Abdulrazak Gurnah) and writers not often seen in a postcolonial context (James Kelman, Seamus Deane, Hanif Kureishi)--can be situated. The chapters that follow are based around themes such as violent geographics; hallucination, dream and the exotic; mourning and melancholy; diaspora and exile; delocalization and the alibi. This profoundly new approach to the complexities of the postcolonial allows the reader to appreciate some of the richness, but at the same time the political and cultural ambivalence, which underlies postcolonial writing. Throughout the book David Punter continually questions, as one would expect from his many previous books, the definition and scope of the "postcolonial." It is seen throughout as a phenomenon not restricted to the ex- or neo-colonies but as a key characterisation of all our lives at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is an indissoluble part of the development of national imaginings and, at the same time, an alibi for the emergence of a violently assertive "new world order" committed to the management and obliteration of difference. By juxtaposing texts from different cultural traditions and topographies, from Things Fall Apart to The Bone People, from Anot

'This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.'Professor Donna Landry, University of KentIn this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland. The formal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenth-century English literature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travel writers, merchants, and colonists. Writers (even those suspicious of mercantile and colonial expansion) worked with a growing sense of a 'national literature' whose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to global imperial power, and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success in 'arms and arts'. The book ranges from Davenant's theatre to Smollet's Roderick Random to Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity.Key Features*An introduction to the impact of mercantilism and empire on the crafting of eighteenth-century British literature*Encourages students to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenth-century British literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined

This book examines the relationship between Romantic writing and the rapidly expanding British Empire.

Africa -- Asia -- The Caribbean -- Ireland -- Australia/New Zealand -- Canada

This reference book surveys the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing, then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of some 60 writers, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahbar Ben Jelloun, among others. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many different perspectives. The volume concludes with a selected general bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleo's comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the region's linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization.