Contemporary World Writers – serie

This book provides a unique account of Walcott's development as a writer in addition to being the fullest study of his poetry and plays to date.Discusses all his major works and includes information on his out-of-print and unpublished plays along with .

An illuminating study of one of the best-selling, most widely studied black authors today. Explains Morrison's relation to the American civil rights and Black Consciousness movements. Places Morrison in a political and historical context .

This is the first full-length study of Alice Munro's work to be published in Britain. Highlights Munro's distinctive storytelling methods where everything becomes both 'touchable and mysterious'.

Ngugi is one of the most important novelists on the contemporary world stage, and someone whose name has for many become synonymous with cultural controversy and political struggle.Patrick William’s lucid analysis offers the most up-to-date study of Ngugi’s writing, including his most rcent collection of essays. Focusing on important aspects of Ngugi’s work which critics have hitherto ignored, and drawing on a wide range of relevant theoretical perspectives, this study examines the growing complexity of Ngugi’s accounts of the history of colonised and post-colonial Kenya. The cultural and anti-imperial politics on Ngugi’s experimentation with language and form in both novel and drama is discussed, including the important role of culture as a source of historical memory and strategies of resistance for oppressed groups.All the novels and the major plays are studies in detail, and in addition a substantial chapter examines Ngugi’s contribution in the area of non-fiction.

Les Murray is amongst the most gifted poets writing today, his multi-faceted talents have received high praise both in his native Australia and beyond. But he has also proved a controversial figure, whose poetry strays across the boundaries of political and cultural debate. The only full critical study of Murray's work available, Steven Matthews provides a complete picture of his career to date, from its early parables of national emergence to the working man's epic encounter with the major events of the twentieth century, Fredy Neptune. Provides detailed readings of key poems, as well as literary and cultural contexts for the rapid shifts in style and subject matter Murray has made from collection to collection. Gives an overview of Murray's place within Australian literature and national thought.

How Japanese is Ishiguro?What role does memory and unreliability play in his narratives?Why was The Unconsoled (1995) perceived to be such a radical break from the earlier novels?. The first complete study to consider all of Ishiguro's work from A pale view of the hills (1982) to When we were Orphans (2000), including his short stories and television plays. Explores the centrality of dignity and displacement in Ishiguro's vision, and teases out the connotations of home and homelessness in his fictions. Invaluable for students at all levels, especially as The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro is a set text at GCSE and A Level.

The first book-length study of one of Britain's most successful young writers. His work in a range of genres, from drama to film, fiction and short stories, has elicited widespread critical acclaim and - at times - provoked sharp condemnation. Provides a detailed account of his work to date, from Kureishi's early involvement in 'fringe' theatre (an area generally ignored hitherto), to the short story collections. Locates Kureishi's work securely in its historical, social, cultural and critical contexts, as well as providing detailed readings of all the major works. Kureishi is an important writer due to his intervention into such modish topics as British identity, questions of race, aspects of gender and choice of genre.

R.K. Narayan’s reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of “authentic” Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan’s writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi.Narayan’s imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan’s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

R.K. Narayan’s reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of “authentic” Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan’s writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi.Narayan’s imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan’s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

This is the most comprehensive study to date of Amy Tan’s work. It offers close readings of her texts in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality.In contrast with Tan’s own American-born narrators, and mainstream critics, Bella Adams’s study looks beyond the stereotypes which appear in Tan’s books, and explores the ways in which Chinese immigrants and their American relatives struggle to understand each others ‘best qualities’ via the Chinese tradition of the ‘talk story’. She emphasises Tan's American narrators' process of becoming Chinese and discovering 'real China', and the significance of the ironic staging of these moments.Students will find this study both accessible and probing, and scholars will welcome its contribution to our understanding of a significant figure in contemporary literature.

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. In this volume Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings and her two-book 'life-writing project'.The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity -- or fakery -- of her cultural references. Grice traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novels, Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace.Maxine Hong Kingston will be of value to students and academics researching in the areas of diaspora writing, contemporary American and Asian- Amercianfiction, as well as feminist and postcolonial literature.

Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work.The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer.As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.

Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work.The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer.As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.

The award-winning novelist Rohinton Mistry is recognised as one of the most important contemporary writers of postcolonial literature. This study - the first of its kind - will provide scholars and students with an insight into the key features of Mistry's work. Peter Morey suggests how the author's writing can be read in terms of recent Indian political history, his native Zoroastrian culture and ethos, conventions of oral storytellling common to Persia and South Asia, and the experience of migration which now sees him living in Canada. The texts are viewed through the lens of diaspora and minority discourse theories to show how Mistry's writing is illustrative of marginal positions in relation to sanctioned national identities.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This is a revised and expanded edition of Woodcock's accessible study, now including detailed readings of Carey's latest novels, 'Jack Maggs' and 'True History of the Kelly Gang'.

Don Randall’s comprehensive study situates Malouf within the field of contemporary international and postcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author’s affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, finding the unity of his work in the continuity of his ethical concerns: for Malouf, human lives find their value in transformations, specifically in instances of self-overcoming that encounters with difference or otherness provoke. However, the book is fully aware of, and informed by, the quite ample body of criticism on Malouf, and thus provides readers with a broad-based understanding of how Malouf’s works have been received and assessed. It is an effective companion volume for studies in postcolonial or Australian literature, for any study project in which Malouf figures prominently.

Don Randall’s comprehensive study situates Malouf within the field of contemporary international and postcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author’s affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, finding the unity of his work in the continuity of his ethical concerns: for Malouf, human lives find their value in transformations, specifically in instances of self-overcoming that encounters with difference or otherness provoke. However, the book is fully aware of, and informed by, the quite ample body of criticism on Malouf, and thus provides readers with a broad-based understanding of how Malouf’s works have been received and assessed. It is an effective companion volume for studies in postcolonial or Australian literature, for any study project in which Malouf figures prominently.

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India.Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies and so this book is both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial' - in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Amitav Ghosh is for students and teachers of postcolonial literatures in English at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India.Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies making this book both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial', in particular, its relation to postmodernism.Aimed at students and the general reader, this book is an ideal introduction to one of contemporary literature's most fascinating writers.

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints, a novelist of extraordinary imaginative range and power, and an erudite, and often fearless, commentator upon the state of global politics today. In this comprehensive and lucid critical study, Andrew Teverson examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie’s fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure. Teverson also offers detailed critical readings of all Rushdie’s novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown. This definitive guide will be of interest to those working in the fields of contemporary world writing in English, postcolonial studies, twentieth and twenty-first century British literatures, and studies in the novel.

This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and has recently published what she has announced will be her final novel. Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing’s relationship with feminism and the impact of her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, this book argues that Lessing's writing was formed by her experiences of the colonial encounter; it makes use of postcolonial theory and criticism to examine Lessing's continued interest in ideas of nation, empire, gender and race and the connections between them.The book examines the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Doris Lessing’s work as well as the general reader who enjoys her writing. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

Slavery is a recurring subject in works by the contemporary black writers in Britain Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar, yet their return to this past arises from an urgent need to understand the racial anxieties of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. This book examines the ways in which their literary explorations of slavery may shed light on current issues in Britain today, or what might be thought of as the continuing legacies of the UK’s largely forgotten slave past.In this highly original study of contemporary postcolonial literature, Abigail Ward explores a range of novels, poetry and non-fictional works by these authors in order to investigate their creative responses to the slave past. This is the first study to focus exclusively on British literary representations of slavery, and thoughtfully engages with such notions as the ethics of exploring slavery, the memory and trauma of this past, and the problems of taking a purely historical approach to Britain’s involvement in slavery or Indian indenture. Although all three authors are concerned with the problem of how to commence representing slavery, their approaches to this problem vary immensely, and this book investigates these differences.

Chinua Achebe has long been regarded as Africa’s foremost writer. In this major new study, Jago Morrison offers a comprehensive reassessment of his work as an author, broadcaster, editor and political thinker. With new, historically contextualised readings of all of his major works, this is the first study to view Achebe’s oeuvre in its entirety, from Things Fall Apart and the early novels, through the revolutionary Ahiara Declaration – previously attributed to Emeka Ojukwu – to the revealing final works The Education of a British Educated Child and There Was a Country. Contesting previous interpretations which align Achebe too easily with this or that nationalist programme, the book reveals Achebe as a much more troubled figure than critics have habitually assumed. Authoritative and wide-ranging, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Achebe’s work in the twenty-first century.

Slavery is a recurring subject in works by the contemporary black writers in Britain Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar, yet their return to this past arises from an urgent need to understand the racial anxieties of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. Now available in paperback, this book examines the ways in which their literary explorations of slavery may shed light on current issues in Britain today, or what might be thought of as the continuing legacies of the UK’s largely forgotten slave past.In this highly original study of contemporary postcolonial literature, Ward explores a range of novels, poetry and non-fictional works in order to investigate their creative responses to the slave past. This is the first study to focus exclusively on British literary representations of slavery, and thoughtfully engages with such notions as the ethics of exploring slavery, the memory and trauma of this past, and the problems of taking a purely historical approach to Britain’s involvement in slavery or Indian indenture. Although all three authors are concerned with the problem of how to commence representing slavery, their approaches to this problem vary immensely, and this book investigates these differences.

Chinua Achebe has long been regarded as Africa’s foremost writer. In this major new study, Jago Morrison offers a comprehensive reassessment of his work as an author, broadcaster, editor and political thinker. With new, historically contextualised readings of all of his major works, this is the first study to view Achebe’s oeuvre in its entirety, from Things Fall Apart and the early novels, through the revolutionary Ahiara Declaration – previously attributed to Emeka Ojukwu – to the revealing final works The Education of a British Educated Child and There Was a Country. Contesting previous interpretations which align Achebe too easily with this or that nationalist programme, the book reveals Achebe as a much more troubled figure than critics have habitually assumed. Authoritative and wide-ranging, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Achebe’s work in the twenty-first century.