It has been more than 25 years since Moses Aloetta became one of the 'Lonely Londoners' in the novel of that name. Now - though an avowed Anglophile - he hankers for Trinidad, for sunshine, Carnival, and rum punch. With characteristic irony and delicacy of touch, Sam Selvon tells the story of Moses' re-encounter with his native land. This edition of the novel includes a new introduction to Selvon's life and work by Susheila Nasta, as well as a preface by 'Moses' that was written in 1992 for the first US edition of the work. This edition of Moses Migrating includes a new introduction to Selvon's life and work by Susheila Nasta, as well as a preface by 'Moses' that was written in 1992 for the first US edition of the work.
In The Past Few Years Much Theoretical Debate Has Explored Several Cultural Issues In The Anglophone Caribbean, Focusing On The Central Experience Of Colonialism As Well As On The Contemporary Postcolonial Condition And The Possible Formation Of Neo-Colonial Configurations.Some Of The Constituent Traits Of The Caribbean Experience Are Dealt With In This Study, Such As The Relationship Between The Caribbean And Great Britain From A Cultural And Literary Perspective In The Twentieth Century, Multiculturalism And Ethnicity, The Interplay Of Orality And Literature And An Investigation Of Linguistic Issues, In Particular The Creolization Of The English Language Under World Influences.Different Strands Are Brought Together In The Analysis Of Sam Selvon S London Trilogy The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending And Moses Migrating, Considering Questions Of Identity For Ex-Colonials In The Crucial Years Between The End Of World War Ii And The 1980S In Britain, Relationships Between European Versus African And Indian Cultural Heritage, Clash Of Cultures As Represented Via Language, Ideas Of National Identity As An Imaginative Process Also Reflecting Dynamics Of Power Inside Society.The Use Of Creole Represents An Ideal Clinging To Caribbean Modes Of Cultural Survival, Which Is Also Buttressed By The Postcolonial Contamination Of The Traditional Western Bourgeois Genre, The Novel. After The Colonial Demise, The Genre Of The Novel Mirrors Approaches Of Communication More Oral-Oriented Than Those Linked To Western Written Aesthetic Values, And The Strategies Used By Selvon Are Surveyed To Show The Interrelationships Between Language, Power, Literature And Cultural Identities. The London Trilogy Is Analysed According To Linguistic, Literary And Cultural Paradigms, Shedding Lights On The Relevance Of Selvon S Work For The Construction Of A Culturally Independent Caribbean Literature.It Is Hoped That The Present Book Will Prove Immensely Useful To The Students And Researchers Of English Literature Concerned With The Works Of Sam Selvon. While The Teachers Of The Subject Will Consider It An Ideal Reference Book, The General Readers Will Find It Highly Interesting.
This book discusses a new breed of racism, namely language racism, which is spreading both in the USA and in Europe, as well as other parts of the world. The book is a manifesto promoting a more positive view of linguistic and cultural diversity.
The Arthurian legend closes with a promise: On a distant day, when his country calls, the king will return. His lost realm will be regained, and his shattered dream of an ideal world will, at last, be realized. This collection of original essays explores the issue of return in the modern Arthurian legend. With an Introduction by noted scholar Raymond H. Thompson and 13 essays by authors from the fields of literature, art history, film history, and folklore, this collection reveals the flexibility of the legend. Just as the modern legend takes the form current to its generation, the myth of return generates a new legend with each telling. As these authors show, return can come in the form of a noble king or a Caribbean immigrant, with the mystery of an art theft or a dying boy's dream.
The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Studying works by Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Samuel Selvon, Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, it shows how contemporary fiction reflected the transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, and preserved its transformative potential while redefiningits possible futures. With this long view of postwar fiction, this volume demonstrates the holding power of welfare's promises of repair and Britain's mid-century on the British cultural imagination.
The Novel Now is an intelligent and engaging survey ofcontemporary British fiction. Discusses familiar names such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan,Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter and compares them with morerecent authors, including David Mitchell, Ali Smith, A.L. Kennedy,Matt Thorne, Nicola Barker, and Toby Litt Incorporates original coverage of subgenres such as chick lit,lad lit, gay fiction, crime fiction, and the historical novel Discusses the ways in which notions of regional identity andtribalist views have surfaced in UK and Irish fiction, and howpost-Imperial sensibility has become a feature of the‘British’ novel Situates contemporary fiction within its socio-cultural andliterary contexts.
From Chinua Achebe to Marina Warner, Writing Across Worlds brings together new interviews and interviews with major international writers previously featured in the pages of Wasafiri magazine, founded in 1984 and now celebrating its twentieth anniversary.
There are numerous twentieth century writers in English who are not technically native speakers of the language, and whose relation to it is ambivalent, problematic or even hostile: by a simple kinship analogy one may often speak of the 'stepmother tongue'. Whilst fully aware of the current debates in postcolonial theory, John Skinner is also conscious of its sometimes unhelpful complexities and contradictions. The focus of this study is thus firmly on the fictional practice of the writers discussed. He offers the reader an insight into the diversity and rewards of contemporary anglophone fiction, whilst analysing some eighty individual texts. A uniquely comprehensive guide, the book will be welcomed by students and teachers of postcolonial literature.
The contributors to the present volume, in espousing and extending the programme of such writers as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, lay bare the genealogy of 'writing' empire (thereby, in a sense, 'un-writing' it). One focus is the Caribbean: the retrograde agenda of francophone créolité; the re-writing of empire in the postmodern disengagement of Edouard Glissant; resistance to post-colonial allegiances, and the dissolving of binary categories, in contemporary West Indian writing. Essays on India, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore various aspects of cultural self-understanding in Asia: un-writing high culture through hybrid 'shopping' among Western styles; the use of indigenous oral forms to counter Western hegemony; romantic and anti-romantic attitudes towards empire and the land. A shift to Africa brings a study of Nadine Gordimer's feminist un-writing of Hemingway's masculinist colonising narrative, a searching analysis of Soyinka's restoration of ancient syncretic elements in his West African re-visions of Greek tragedy, changing evaluations of the validity of European civilization in André Gide's representations of Africa, and tensions of linguistic allegiance in Maghreb literature. North America, finally, is brought back into the imperial fold through discussions of Melville's re-writing of travel and captivity narratives to critique the mission of American empire, Leslie Marmon Silko's re-territorialization of expropriated Native American oral traditions, and Timothy Findley's representation of Canada's troubled involvement with its three shaping empires (French, British, American).
