New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing is a collection of critical and creative writing in honour of the postcolonial critic, editor and anthologist Bruce King. There are essays on topics relating to Caribbean authors (Derek Walcott, Simone and Andre Schwarz-Bart); diaspora writers in England (Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Michael Ondaatje), South East Asian writing in English (Arun Kolatkar, recent Pakistani fiction, Anita Desai) and New Zealand, Canadian and Pacific writers (Albert Wendt, Patricia Grace, Bill Manhire, Joseph Boyden, Greg O’Brien). The creative writing section features new work by David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Arvind Mehrotra, Jeet Thayil, Meena Alexander, Keki Daruwalla, Adil Jussawalla, Tabish Khair, Susan Visvanathan and others, reflecting King’s pioneering work on Indian poetry in English, and his many friendships.

Focuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelistsThe Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms arealist, apostmodernist, ahistorical and apostcolonialist fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms.Also discusses the works of: Maggie OFarrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.

The words fear, risk and safety have come to define our contemporary age and have been construed as a dynamic background in the human sciences against which most risk narratives, imaginative or otherwise, can be read. This volume brings together original articles to investigate “cultures of fear” in post-millennial works and covers a wide variety of topics ranging from post-millennial political fictions, post-humanist and postcolonial rewritings to trauma narratives, risk narratives, literary disaster discourses and apocalyptic scenarios. Featuring theoretical and analytical approaches with insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, as well as the general reader.

Michael Ondaatje has achieved international prominence and recognition in a way that few other writers have, let alone Canadian writers. This popularity is most pronounced for works of historical fiction such as The English Patient, winner of the Golden Man Booker Prize, and In the Skin of a Lion, set in 1930s Toronto, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and winner of the Canada Reads competition in 2002. But Ondaatje has been writing for over fifty years, and his innovative works include some of the most accomplished poetry in the English-speaking world. Taking its title from a question in his poem “Tin Roof,” Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? reassesses Ondaatje’s writing and the role of the poet, from his troubled explorations of the self-reflexive artist to his most recent novels. Comprehensive in both approach and coverage, this new collection offers groundbreaking analysis informed by an understanding of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre, placing early poetry collections like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do alongside the full range of his novels and his extensive work as a literary editor. The book highlights the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic issues that have become increasingly apparent in Ondaatje’s work. Contributors explore key interests that have reappeared and been rethought across his fiction and poetry: the construction of identity; the nature of memory and its relation to family origins and history; the human body as a site of contestation and struggle; the contrast between Eastern and Western values and the Southeast Asian diaspora; the writer’s responsibility in depictions of war, psychic trauma, and genocide; and an ongoing fascination with the visual and the media of photography and film. An eclectic celebration of an iconic author, Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? offers an authoritative reference point for scholars and students of literature and reveals new facets of a major author to his readers around the world.

Liminal Diasporas: Contemporary Movements of Humanity and the Environment offers readers a new lens through which to critically re-evaluate the necropolitics of migration. Using the term "liminal diasporas," the co-editors and range of authors define this notion as migratory bodies that are simultaneously subject to danger, violence, and precarious modalities of life. The chapters in this edited volume cover a range of topics including diasporic camp life for Palestinians, queer South Asian diasporas in the Caribbean, close readings of various texts, reformulations of "home" and "homeland," children’s play/games, and even representations of zombie diaspora. Overall, these chapters, along with the incisive Preface and Afterword that bookend them, offer compelling readings of what it means today to be a liminal diaspora before the era of COVID 19 into today’s woeful violence in Gaza, Ukraine, and other parts of the world. Liminal Diasporas, as such, is a timely and urgent collection that compels us to rethink the human condition in relation to possibly the most material existential crises that our planet has ever witnessed. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison: Fragmented Identities places comparative literature in a postcolonial context in order to widen its traditional scope and thereby pay greater attention to the relationship between indigenous and hegemonic cultures.

Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives – the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence – to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers). The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world.

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader. Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.

In this comprehensive textbook, editors Matthew J. Brown, Randy Duncan, and Matthew J. Smith offer students a deeper understanding of the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels by introducing key theories and critical methods for analyzing comics. Each chapter explains and then demonstrates a critical method or approach, which students can then apply to interrogate and critique the meanings and forms of comic books, graphic novels, and other sequential art. Contributors introduce a wide range of critical perspectives on comics, including disability studies, parasocial relationships, scientific humanities, queer theory, linguistics, critical geography, philosophical aesthetics, historiography, and much more. As a companion to the acclaimed Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, this second volume features 19 fresh perspectives and serves as a stand-alone textbook in its own right. More Critical Approaches to Comics is a compelling classroom or research text for students and scholars interested in Comics Studies, Critical Theory, the Humanities, and beyond.