Postcolonial Literary Studies: The First Thirty Years(A Modern Fiction Studies Book)

Internationally recognized for its superior scholarship, Modern Fiction Studies was one of the first journals to publish articles on postcolonial studies. Since postcolonialism's inception, scholars have defined, clarified, and enriched its conceptions and theoretical development in the pages of MFS. This anthology collects the best and most important articles on postcolonial literary studies published in MFS in the past thirty years. Postcolonial Literary Studies brings together groundbreaking scholarship focusing on significant works of fiction by such writers as Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and more. The essays feature ideas that helped shape the discipline from its earliest stages to the present and represent some of the finest examples of literary, theoretical, historical, and cultural criticism. With its focus on literary figures and texts, rather than solely on theory, this volume fills a significant gap in the fields of postcolonialism, global studies, and literary criticism in general. This rich collection of essays by the field's leading scholars will prove indispensable to instructors and students across a broad spectrum of humanistic studies. It not only highlights the development and transformation of postcolonial literary study but also, by mapping out new directions of study, considers its continual significance and expansion.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments The First Thirty Years of Postcolonial Literary Scholarship: The Continuing Importance of a Discipline Part I: Paradigms Chapter 1. The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative) Chapter 2. Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism, and the Colonial Subject Chapter 3. Imperial Triangles: Mark Twain's Foreign Affairs Chapter 4. Fiction and the Law: Recent Inscriptions of Gayness in South Africa Chapter 5. Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women's Texts Chapter 6. Re-Membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones Chapter 7. Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction Part II: Postcolonial Africa Chapter 8. Smoke of the Savannah: Traveling Modernity in Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood Chapter 9. Mourning the Postapartheid State Already? The Poetics of Loss in Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying Chapter 10. Ngūgī wa Thiong'o's Postnation: The Cultural Geographies of Colonial, Neocolonial, and Postnational Space Chapter 11. Truth, Telling, Questioning: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, and Literature after Apartheid Chapter 12. The Pastoral Promise and the Political Imperative: The Plaasroman Tradition in an Era of Land Reform Part III: Postcolonial India Chapter 13. Leading History by the Nose: The Turn to the Eighteenth Century in Midnight's Children Chapter 14. The Feminist Plot and the Nationalist Allegory: Home and World in Two Indian Women's Novels in English Chapter 15. Memory, Identity, Patriarchy: Projecting a Past in the Memoirs of Sara Suleri and Michael Ondaatje Chapter 16. Figures of Colonial Resistance Part IV: New Directions Chapter 17. Introduction: Worldly English Chapter 18. Narrative in Prison: Stories from the Palestinian Intifada Chapter 19. Globalization, Postcoloniality, and the Problem of Literary Studies in The Satanic Verses Chapter 20. National Narratives, Postnational Narration Chapter 21. Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi Chapter 22. Tenderness: A Mediator of Identity and Gender Construction in Politics List of Contributors Index

About the Author :
Robert P. Marzec is an associate professor of British and postcolonial literature at Purdue University, associate editor of Modern Fiction Studies, and author of An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: Empire and Enclosures, from Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie.

Review :
With its focus on literary figures and texts, rather than solely on theory, this volume fills a significant gap in the fields of postcolonialism, global studies, and literary criticism in general. This rich collection of essays by the field's leading scholars will prove indispensable to instructors and students across a broad spectrum of humanistic studies. -- Nancy Lorraine Midwest Book Review