The range of literature written in English but produced outside Britain and America has expanded considerably in recent years. This book provides a comparative and up-to-date survey of colonial, new national and post-colonial literatures, and related criticism. At the same time, the essays address the problem of establishing such politicized categories of literature; they recognize that, in a time of massive migration, rapid international communication, and increased demands by minorities, national cultures and national identities are less stable than ever before. Intended as an introduction...

This is the first full-scale literary biography of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. It traces the creative contradictions in his life from colonial St. Lucia, where he was part of a tiny English-speaking Protestant mulatto elite in an overwhelmingly French-Creole Roman Catholic black society, to 1999 when, a star of international literature and a symbol of cultural decolonization, he wanted to be Poet Laureate of England. The author had had access to letters, diaries, uncollected and unpublished writings, and conducted numerous interviews in the Caribbean, North America,...

This revised and updated introduction to the novels and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul will be of interest to students, specialists and general readers. Chronological chapters examine the structure, significance and development of Naipaul's writing, setting the texts in their autobiographical, philosophical, social and political, colonial and post-colonial contexts. New chapters in the second edition include an expanded biographical introduction, and discussion of the recent novels A Way in the World and Half a Life, Naipaul's writings on Islam, and the criticism of Naipaul by writers and...