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Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana emphasises the significance of the Caribbean in an increasingly globalised social world and draws attention to the contribution that scholarship in Caribbean Studies makes in coming to terms with a multi-cultural heritage. The compilation deliberately ranges in focus across periods, geographies, linguistic divisions and subject matter to present the fruition of significant research projects by 25 researchers from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Contributors on the Hispanic, Dutch, African, Indian and Anglophone Caribbean juxtaposed with work on the Caribbean diasporas of the USA, UK, Canada and the Netherlands enrich the text with multiple perspectives.
Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canoni...
By 1940 going to the movies was the most popular form of public leisure in Britain's empire. This book explores the social and cultural impact of the movies in colonial societies in the early cinema age.
Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.
Diasporic Marvellous Realism highlights the interesting switch in perspective found in contemporary literary production where the supernatural is regarded from a diasporic perspective as marvellous rather than magical. The titular term is applied to the influence of transterritorialization on the works of first- and second generation immigrant writers when approaching and exploring the myths and legends of their culture of origin. The texts included in this analysis show that the employment of this literary philosophy and narrative technique in contemporary literature involves a fruitful refocusing of the rhetorical gaze regarding the importance of cultural heritage as vindicatory resistance to the lacunae of history and as celebratory re-enfranchisement of diasporic communities in host countries such as Canada and the UK.
The first full-length study of Scottish literature using a post-devolutionary understanding of postcolonial studies
This book focuses on the fiction of four postcolonial authors: V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie. It argues that meals in their novels act as sites where the relationships between the individual subject and the social identities of race, class and gender are enacted. Drawing upon a variety of academic fields and disciplines — including postcolonial theory, historical research, food studies and recent attempts to rethink the concept of world literature — it dedicates a chapter to each author, tracing the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which their texts are located and exploring the ways in which food and the act of eating acquire meanings and how those meanings might clash, collide and be disputed. Not only does this book offer suggestive new readings of the work of its four key authors, but it challenges the reader to consider the significance of food in postcolonial fiction more generally.
This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes–Jelinek (1929–2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liège, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes–Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray ...
How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a 'heritage industry' during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade's own set of fundamental crises.
Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner. In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ‘take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ‘comparative’? Or by ‘world’? What constitute ‘transgressions’ or ‘refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.