Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction

Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-07-19

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9004464263

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The concepts of 'youth' and the 'postcolonial' both inhabit a liminal locus where new ways of being in the world are rehearsed and struggle for recognition against the impositions of dominant power structures. Departing from this premise, the present volume focuses on the experience of postcolonial youngsters in contemporary Britain as rendered in fiction, thus envisioning the postcolonial as a site of fruitful and potentially transformative friction between different identitary variables or sociocultural interpellations. In so doing, this volume provides varied evidence of the ability of literature—and of the short story genre, in particular—to represent and swiftly respond to a rapidly changing world as well as to the new socio-cultural realities and conflicts affecting our current global order and the generations to come. Contributors are: Isabel M. Andrés-Cuevas, Isabel Carrera-Suárez, Claire Chambers, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Bettina Jansen, Indrani Karmakar, Carmen Lara-Rallo, Laura María Lojo-Rodríguez, Noemí Pereira-Ares, Gérald Préher, Susanne Reichl, Carla Rodríguez-González, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Karima Thomas and Laura Torres-Zúñiga.


Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature

Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature

Author: Blanka Grzegorczyk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-03

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1317962621

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This book considers how contemporary British children’s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain’s imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. The insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power structures in recent children’s novels exposes the complexities and contradictions surrounding the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity. Postcolonial children’s literature in Britain has been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. Grzegorczyk considers the ways in which children’s fictions have worked with and against particular ideologies of race. The texts analyzed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as complex, hybrid products of colonialism, global migrations, and the ideology of multiculturalism. By examining the ideological content of these novels, Grzegorczyk demonstrates the centrality of the colonial past to contemporary British writing for the young.


Contemporary British Fiction

Contemporary British Fiction

Author: Nick Bentley

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2008-08-27

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0748630376

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This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from 1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism, gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader debates in contemporary culture.A comprehensive Introduction provides a historical context for the study of contemporary British fiction by detailing significant social, political and cultural events. This is followed by five chapters organised around the core themes: (1) Narrative Forms, (2) Contemporary Ethnicities, (3) Gender and Sexuality, (4) History, Memory and Writing, and (5) Narratives of Cultural Space.


Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel

Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel

Author: Stephen Ross

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-12-13

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1350067873

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From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many subcultures of Britain's teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of some of the most influential contemporary British writers. In this vivid work of cultural history, Stephen Ross explores: · The manic teenage vision of Absolute Beginners · The Angry Young Men of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning · Skinheads and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange · Irony and authenticity in the 1980s – from Amis to Kureishi · Heroin chic, disaffection and Trainspotting Examining the cultural contexts of some of the most important and popular post-1945 British novels, the book covers such themes as crises of masculinity, multiculturalism and inter-generational conflict, and in doing so casts new light on British writing today.


Voices of the Other

Voices of the Other

Author: Roderick McGillis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1136601007

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This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children's and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children's literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.


British Fiction of the 1990s

British Fiction of the 1990s

Author: Nick Bentley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 113429249X

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The 1990s proved to be a particularly rich and fascinating period for British fiction. This book presents a fresh perspective on the diverse writings that appeared over the decade, bringing together leading academics in the field. British Fiction of the 1990s: traces the concerns that emerged as central to 1990s fiction, in sections on millennial anxieties, identity politics, the relationship between the contemporary and the historical, and representations of contemporary space offers distinctive new readings of the most important novelists of the period, including Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson shows how British fiction engages with major cultural debates of the time, such as the concern with representing various identities and cultural groups, or theories of ‘the end of history’ discusses 1990s fiction in relation to broader literary and critical theories, including postmodernism, post-feminism and postcolonialism. Together the essays highlight the ways in which the writing of the 1990s represents a development of the themes and styles of the post-war novel generally, yet displays a range of characteristics distinct to the decade.


Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism

Author: Robert J. C. Young

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-10-12

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 1118896866

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This seminal work—now available in a 15th anniversary edition with a new preface—is a thorough introduction to the historical and theoretical origins of postcolonial theory. Provides a clearly written and wide-ranging account of postcolonialism, empire, imperialism, and colonialism, written by one of the leading scholars on the topic Details the history of anti-colonial movements and their leaders around the world, from Europe and Latin America to Africa and Asia Analyzes the ways in which freedom struggles contributed to postcolonial discourse by producing fundamental ideas about the relationship between non-western and western societies and cultures Offers an engaging yet accessible style that will appeal to scholars as well as introductory students


A Postcolonial People

A Postcolonial People

Author: Nasreen Ali

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9781850657972

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This is a critical survey of contemporary South Asian Britain. The book combines analysis with empirically rich studies to map out the diversity of the British Asian way of life. The contributors provide insights & information on the Asian British experience in its socio-economic & cultural dimensions.


Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction

Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Robert J. C. Young

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2003-06-26

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0191622273

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This innovative and lively book is quite unlike any other introduction to postcolonialism. Robert Young examines the political, social, and cultural after-effects of decolonization by presenting situations, experiences, and testimony rather than going through the theory at an abstract level. He situates the debate in a wide cultural context, discussing its importance as an historical condition, with examples such as the status of aboriginal people, of those dispossessed from their land, Algerian raï music, postcolonial feminism, and global social and ecological movements. Above all, Young argues, postcolonialism offers a political philosophy of activism that contests the current situation of global inequality, and so in a new way continues the anti-colonial struggles of the past. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature

Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature

Author: Blanka Grzegorczyk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-10

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1351385380

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The widespread threat of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence in the twenty-first century has created a globalized context for social interactions, transforming the ways in which young people relate to the world around them and to one another. This is the first study that reads post-9/11 and 7/7 British writing for the young as a response to this contemporary predicament, exploring how children’s writers find the means to express the local conditions and different facets of the global wars around terror. The texts examined in this book reveal a preoccupation with overcoming various forms of violence and prejudice faced by certain groups within post-terror Britain, as well as a concern with mapping out their social relations with other groups, and those concerns are set against the recurring themes of racist paranoia, anti-immigrant hostility, politicized identities, and growing up in countries transformed by the effects of terror and counter-terror. The book concentrates on the relationship between postcolonial and critical race studies, Britain’s colonial legacy, and literary representations of terrorism, tracing thematic and formal similarities in the novels of both established and emerging children’s writers such as Elizabeth Laird, Sumia Sukkar, Alan Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Bali Rai, Nikesh Shukla, Malorie Blackman, Claire McFall, Miriam Halahmy, and Sita Brahmachari. In doing so, this study maps new connections for scholars, students, and readers of contemporary children’s fiction who are interested in how such writing addresses some of the most pressing issues affecting us today, including survival after terror, migration, and community building.