Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies - (Postcolonial Literary Studies) by Graham MacPhee (Paperback)

About the Book

Explores a wide range of writers through the lens of postcolonial theory, focusing on themes of imperialism and decolonisation, globalisation and national identity.

Book Synopsis

Examines the legacy of imperialism and decolonisation, globalisation and national identityGraham MacPhee explains how postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions to represent both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism. He discusses a wide range of writers, from Auden, Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Larkin to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tony Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan.Key Features* Explores concepts and critical terms such as 'British national literature', 'new ethnicities', 'migrancy' and 'hybridity'* Case studies of postwar texts include: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dread Beat an' Blood, Tony Harrison's V, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Leila Aboulela's Minaret and Ian McEwan's Saturday

From the Back Cover

AUTHOR-APPROVED Postcolonial Literary Studies Series Editors: David Johnson and Ania Loomba This series examines how Postcolonial Studies reconfigures the major periods and areas of literature. The books relate key literary and cultural texts both to their historical and geographical contexts, and to contemporary issues of neo-colonialism and global inequality. Each volume not only provides a comprehensive survey of the existing field of scholarship and debate, but is also an original intervention in its own right. Each book includes: a time line; an introductory literature survey; discussion of critical, theoretical, historical and political debates; exemplary critical readings of literary texts; and further reading. Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies Graham MacPhee 'Graham MacPhee brilliantly follows the historical tracks of empire into the heartlands of post-war British literature, an area often assumed to be relatively untouched by colonial impacts and their contingent modernist entanglements. This timely and necessary study lays bare how colonial cultural legacies are everywhere palpable within this landscape.' Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford Re-assesses current approaches to postwar British writing in light of ongoing debates within postcolonial and globalization studies Graham MacPhee argues that the process of decolonization was far more uneven and contradictory than is often assumed, and needs to be understood as reinforcing the transition to a new structure of global hegemony as well as marking the end of formal European colonialism. This study examines poetry, drama, and fiction as well as cultural criticism, theory, and political discourse, and discusses a wide range of writers from George Orwell, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin to Sam Selvon, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tony Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Andrea Levy, Ian McEwan, and Leila Aboulela. Graham MacPhee is As

Review Quotes

Graham MacPhee brilliantly follows the historical tracks of empire into the heartlands of post-war British literature, an area often assumed to be relatively untouched by colonial impacts and their contingent modernist entanglements. This timely and necessary studylays bare how colonial cultural legacies are everywhere palpable within this landscape.--Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford

...is an admirably lucid cultural materialist analysis of the period from the end of the Second World War to the present.--Ashley Dawson, College of Staten Island, CUNY "College Literature 39.3"

Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies suggests many fruitful ways in which one can read the intersections between empire's legacy and post-war British literature, opening up territory for future studies.--Huw Marsh, Queen Mary, University of London "Postcolonial Text, Vol 8, No 1"

A very well researched, well argued, richly textured, and very rewarding read especially for students of colonial and postcolonial studies regardless of subject concentration.--Baba G Jallow, Creighton University "Interventions 14:3"

An admirably lucid cultural materialist analysis of the period from the end of Second World War to the present, and of the literary texts through which writers sought to grapple with and represent Britain's reconfigured position in a world that - all democratizing and developmental rhetoric to the contrary - remains structured by the most brutal forms of imperial power.--Ashley Dawson, College of Staten Island "College Literature 39.3: Summer 2012"

About the Author

Graham MacPhee is Assistant Professor of English at West Chester University. He is the author of The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture (Continuum, 2nd edn, 2007) and co-editor, with Prem Poddar, of Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (Berghahn, 2007).