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.

Provides a fresh account of modernist writing in a perspective based on the reading strategies developed by postcolonial studiesNeither modernity nor colonalism (and likewise, neither postmodernity nor postcoloniality) can be properly understood without recognition of their intertwined development. This book interprets modernity as an asymmetrically global phenomenon complexly connected to the course of Western imperialism, and demonstrates how the impact of Western modernism produced new developments in writing from all the former colonies of Europe and the US. These developments constitute the afterlife of Western modernism.The various ways in which the aesthetic ideologies and writing strategies of Western modernism have been adapted, transposed and modified by some of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century is demonstrated in the book through a set of case studies, each of which juxtaposes a canonical modernist text with a postcolonial text that shows how modernist modes metamorphosed in interaction with the turbulent and volatile realities of colonies and new nations struggling to arrive at a modernity of their own in contexts marked by colonial histories. Thus Kafka's allegories are juxtaposed with the use of allegory in writers like Salman Rushdie and J.M.Coetzee; the gendered modernity of Virginia Woolf is juxtaposed with the disturbing and powerful fictions of writers such as Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield; the intellectualized and urbanized spirituality of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is re-read in the revisionist contexts created by the brilliant and troubled urban spirituality of writers such as Arun Kolatkar from India and a text such as The Woman Who Had Two Navels, from the Philippines.

Africa -- Asia -- The Caribbean -- Ireland -- Australia/New Zealand -- Canada

The essays in Modernism and Colonialism offer revisionary accounts of major British and Irish literary modernists relation to colonialism.

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.

This book works across established categories of modernism and postcolonialism in order to radically revise the periods, places, and topics traditionally associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature. The book is the first account of Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. The book draws on and broadens discussions in and around the blossoming field of global modernist studies by interrogating the conventionally accepted genealogy of development that positions Europe and America as the sites of innovation. It provides an original examination of the relationships between metaphor, postcolonialism, and modernist experimentation by showing how politically and aesthetically innovative African forms rely on allegorical structures, in contrast to the symbolism dominant in Euro-American modernism. An original theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial, Marxist, and ecocritical approaches to literature. The book provides original readings of Schreiner’s three novels, Undine, The Story of An African Farm, and From Man to Man, in light of the new theory of primitivism in African literature by directly addressing the issue of narrative form. This argument is contextualised in relation to the work of other Southern African authors, in whose writings the impact of Schreiner’s politics and aesthetics can be traced. These authors include J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Solomon T. Plaatje, and Zoe Wicomb, amongst others. This book brings the most current debates in modernist studies, ecocriticism, and primitivism into the field of postcolonial studies and contributes to a widening of the debates surrounding gender, race, empire, and modernism.

Public Works looks at a new dimension of a specifically Irish modernism, arguing for the vital importance of infrastructure, specifically electricity, water, and gas.