Canon of Commonwealth Literature

Commonwealth Literature Today Stands For Literature(S) In English Written In The Commonwealth Countries Outside The Anglo-American Tradition. What Is Common Between The Diverse Members Of The Commonwealth In Spite Of Their Different Calendars Of Independence And Ethnological, Cultural, Political As Also Topographical Set-Ups Is That All These Countries Shared The Common Colonial Experience. So, From India To Nigeria, Canada To Kenya, Australia To Pakistan We Can Discern The Varying Patterns Of A Common Human Experience And Emergence Of Cultural Nationalism Leading To An Emphasis On Their Distinctiveness In Literary Heritage And Assertion Of Cultural Identity. Commonwealth Literature Thus Presents A Rich Variety Of Aesthetic And Cultural Experience.The Essays Collected In This Volume Spanning Different Countries And Periods Try To Offer A Taste Of This Interesting Variety. The Range Covered Here Stretches From West African Drama To South African Fiction, Australian And Caribbean Literature To That Of Indian Diaspora And South Asian Poetry Of The Saarc Countries. Discussions On Indian Literature Cover The Varied Areas From Devotional Mysticism To Realistic Social Satire, Myth-Oriented Novel To Feminism, Dialogism And Reassessment Of Postcolonial Theories.The Authors Focused In This Discussion Promises A Colourful Spectrum; They Include Wole Soyinka, Ahmed Essop, Salman Rushdie, David Malouf, Wilson Harris, Patrick White, Rohinton Mistry, G.V. Desani, Aurobindo, Manohar Magonkar, R.K. Narayan, Gurcharan Das, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamala Das, K.V. Venkataramani, Margaret Craven, Along With A Host Of Saarc Poets.The Volume Will Be Useful For The Students And Scholars Of Commonwealth Literature, And Will Also Prove Interesting To The Common Reader.

Contributed essays on works from Africa, Bangladesh, India, New Zealand, and the West Indies.

This ambitious undertaking is designed to acquaint students, teachers, and researchers with reference sources in any branch of English studies, which Marcuse defines as "all those subjects and lines of critical and scholarly inquiry presently pursued by members of university departments of English language and literature.'' Within each of 24 major sections, Marcuse lists and annotates bibliographies, guides, reviews of research, encyclopedias, dictionaries, journals, and reference histories. The annotations and various indexes are models of clarity and usefulness, and cross references are liberally supplied where appropriate. Although cost-conscious librarians will probably consider the several other excellent literary bibliographies in print, such as James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide (Modern Language Assn. of America, 1989), larger academic libraries will want Marcuse's volume.-- Jack Bales, Mary Washington Coll. Lib., Fredericksburg, Va. -Library Journal.

Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in Englishbrings together the proceedings of a symposium organised by the editors at the University of Trento in 1990. At a time when the study of the post-colonial literatures is gaining more widespread recognition, scholars based mainly at universities in Italy and Germany were invited to address the manner in which writers are giving literary expression to the complexity of contemporary post-colonial and multicultural societies and to consider, from their differing perspectives on the new literatures, central questions of formal experimentation, linguistic innovation, social and political commitment, textual theory and cross-culturality. Focusing on such major writers such as Achebe, Soyinka and Walcott, as well as on lesser-known figures such as Jack Davis, Witi Ihimaera, Rohinton Mistry and Manohar Malgonkar, the contributors take up many themes characteristic of the new literatures: the challenge posed to traditional authority, the expression of national identity, the role of literature in the liberation struggle, modes of literary practice in multicultural societies; the relationship of the new literatures in English to that of the former metropolitan centre; and the complex intertextuality characterizing much of the literary production of post-colonial societies.

Postcolonialism has become one of the most exciting, expanding and challenging areas of literary and cultural studies today. Designed especially for those studying the topic for the first time, Beginning Postcolonialism introduces the major areas of concern in a clear, accessible, and organized fashion. It provides an overview of the emergence of postcolonialism as a discipline and closely examines many of its important critical writings.

The modern British Commonwealth, linking fifty countries around the world in voluntary association, cooperation, and consultation, is a unique body in world history. The area of its member countries covers a third of the globe and collectively their peoples represent a quarter of the world's total population. Though essentially different from the British Empire from which it originated, the Commonwealth shares many common historical ties with Britain. Patricia M. Larby and Harry Hannam have assembled an unrivaled body of literature to illustrate the growth of the Empire into the Commonwealth. This extensive bibliography identifies, lists, and annotates the most important publications on the development and growth of the Commonwealth; its present status and functions; and its role in education, literature, sport, and the arts and sciences. It includes its historical origins: its cooperation in economics, politics, and international issues such as the environment; and its many spheres of professional activity including medicine, law, and architecture. Strong emphasis is placed on the role of the English language in the Commonwealth and as a medium for creative literature in many disparate cultures worldwide. The Commonwealth appears at a time when this unique organization is on the threshold of a new era in its history. The proposals emerging from the 1991 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting include statements on democracy and human rights; environmental affairs; and global concerns such as international crime, drug abuse, and AIDS. No previous comprehensive bibliography of the Commonwealth exists, and this volume fills a long-standing gap in the bibliographical coverage. It will be an essential reference source for libraries and scholars involved in Commonwealth studies and will be of particular interest to historians, political scientists, economists, and educators.

The essays in this collection celebrate the signal achievement of Dieter Riemenschneider in helping found and consolidate the study of postcolonial anglophone literatures in Germany and Europe. As well as poems, a short story, drawings of the Indian scene (the first, and abiding, focus of this scholar's work), and 'letters' of reminiscence (one quite grave), there are revealing contributions of a literary-historical nature on the establishment of anglophone (especially African) literatures as an academic discipline within Germany, the UK, and Northern Europe generally, as well as a group of searching reflections on such topics of postcolonial import as globalization and the applicability of models to the literature of the indigene in Canada and Australia. The largest section is devoted to individual topics, each treatment implicitly keyed to approaches to the teaching of New Literatures texts. Writers covered include Anita Desai (landscape and memory), Salman Rushdie (painting in The Moor's Last Sigh), Charlotte Brontë (imperial discourse in Jane Eyre), Derek Walcott (Omeros and cultural cohabitation), and Witi Ihimaera (his rewriting of Katherine Mansfield). Topics dealt with include music and radio in West Africa, the African literary 'hit parade', the New Zealand prose poem, Canadian and Australian war fiction, the Middle Passage in the American and Caribbean novel, Paul Theroux's uneasy relations with V.S. Naipaul, and the colonial discourse of illness and recuperation. The volume closes with Dieter Riemenschneider's very first and most recent critical essays, the one a classic on Mulk Raj Anand, the other a challenging and doubtless controversial thesis on postcolonial minority writing. A select bibliography of Riemenschneider's work (books, edited publications, journal articles and book contributions, reviews and broadcasts) rounds off this substantial collection.

Includes critical excerpts of 139 authors from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and New Zealand.