The ethos and essence of every culture is seen, marked and reflected in all the forms of literature practicsed during the period in the society. The issues and elements related to human life which affect and shape human life are of a great importance. They include society, social issues like faith, superstition, religion, intra-personal, interpersonal and man-woman relationships, war, peace, love, hatred, cruelty, design, cultural conflict, hunger, survival, assertion of suppressed classes, etc. have been focused and interpreted in the creative literary works.

The fourteen essays in this volume contribute significantly to a consideration of the interplay between nation and narration that currently dominates both literary and cultural studies. With the fervent reassertion of tribal domains throughout the world, and with the consequent threat to the stability of a common discourse in putative countries once mapped and subsequently dominated by colonizing powers, the need for such studies becomes increasingly obvious. Whose idea of a nation is to prevail throughout these postcolonial territories; whose claims to speak for a people are to be legitimized by international agreement; amid the demands of patriotic rhetoric, what role may be allowed for individual expression that attempts to transcend the immediate political agenda; who may assume positions of authority in defining an ethnic paradigm — such are the questions variously addressed in this volume. The essayists who here contribute to the discussion are students of the various national literatures that are now becoming more generally available in the West. The range of topics is broad — moving globally from the Caribbean and South America, through the African continent, and on to the Indian subcontinent, and moving temporally through the nineteenth century and into the closing days of our twentieth. We deal with poetry, fiction, and theoretical writings, and have two types of reader in mind: We hope to introduce the uninitiated to the breadth of this expanding field, and we hope to aid those with a specialized knowledge of one or other of these literatures in their consideration of the extent to which post-colonial writing may or may not form a reasonably unified field. We seek to avoid the new form of colonialism that might impose a theoretical template to these quite divergent writings, falsely rendering it all accessible and familiar. At the same time, we do note questions and concerns that cross borders, whether these imagined lines are spatial, temporal, gendered or racial.

Taking as its starting-point the ambiguous heritage left by the British Empire to its former colonies, dominions and possessions, And the Birds Began to Sing marks a new departure in the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature. Gathered under the rubric Christianity and Colonialism, essays on Brian Moore. Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood and Marian Engel, Thomas King, Les A. Murray, David Malouf, Mudrooroo and Philip McLaren, R.A.K. Mason, Maurice Gee, Keri Hulme, Epeli Hau'ofa, J.M. Coetzee, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ngugi wa Thiong'o explore literary portrayals of the effects of British Christianity upon settler and native cultures in Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, and the Africas. These essays share a sense of the dominant presence of Christianity as an inherited system of religious thought and practice to be adapted to changing post-colonial conditions or to be resisted as the lingering ideology of colonial times. In the second section of the collection, Empire and World Religions, essays on Paule Marshall and George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Olive Senior and Caribbean poetry, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Bharati Mukherjee interrogate literature exploring relations between the scions of British imperialism and religious traditions other than Christianity. Expressly concerned with literary embodiments of belief-systems in post-colonial cultures (particularly West African religions in the Caribbean and Hinduism on the Indian subcontinent), these essays also share a sense of Christianity as the pervasive presence of an ideological rhetoric among the economic, social and political dimensions of imperialism. In a polemical Afterword, the editor argues that modes of reading religion and literature in post-colonial cultures are characterised by a theodical preoccupation with a praxis of equity.

In India, After Independence, A Change Felt By Women Was That Many Of The Established Norms Of The Society Were Intended To Check Or Clip Their Growth As Person And Not As Possession . Many Literary Writers Raised Their Voices Against This Old Tradition.In Indian English Literature, Kamala Markandaya An Outstanding Novelist On The Contemporary Commonwealth Literary Scene And Ranks With Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan And Raja Rao Has Initiated The Lead Of Women S Transformation From Possession To Person Through Her Writings. She Has Shown The New Face Of Her Women Who Seek Self-Fulfillment Through Self-Expression In A Milieu Where There Is A Mutuality, Understanding And Tenderness. Although Her Women Do Not Rebel, They Make The Society Realize Of Their Presence As Persons And Not Mere Possession . The New Woman, Clinging To Her Basic Values And Changing Herself According To The Changing Circumstances, Goes Ahead On The Way Seeking For Her Own Identity With New Depth And Getting Recognition. Kamala Markandaya Has Realistically Presented Emotional, Moral And Spiritual Problems Of New Woman. The New Woman In Her Novels Is Not In Proper But In Making . Acquainting The Readers With Kamala Markandaya, The Present Book Seeks To Explore The Unexplored Aspects Of Her Women, To Present The Change In Their Identity, To Highlight The New Image Through A Probe Into Her Novels, And Finally To Show Her Feminist Moral Concern Through An In Depth Investigation Into Sexual And Familial Relationship. It Is Hoped That The Book Will Prove Useful To The Students And Teachers Of Indian English Literature. Since It Focuses On Images Of Women, Even The General Readers Will Find It Interesting And Feel Encouraged To Read The Masterpiece Works Of Kamala Markandaya.

ISBN 9051839588 (paperback) NLG 55.00 From the contents: The female body: a resonant voice in the multicultural scene (Angeles de la Concha).- Fear, desire, and masculinity (Joanne Neff van Aertselaer).- Feminist utopian visions in the early 20th century U.S. (Lois Rudnick).- Women and science fiction (Pamela Sargent).- Female spectatorship in The purple rose of Cairo (Barbara Arizti Martin).

This first volume of ASNEL Papers gathers together a broad range of reflections on, and presentations of, the social and expressive underpinnings of post-colonial literary cultures, concentrating on aspects of orality, social structure and hybridity, the role of women in cultural production, performative and media representations (theatre, film, advertising) and their institutional forms, and the linguistic basis of literature (including questions of multilingualism, pidgins and creoles, and translation). Some of the present studies adopt a diachronic approach, as in essays devoted to European colonial influences on African literatures, the populist colonial roots of Australian drama, and the intersection of exogenous and autochthonous languages in the cultural development and identity formation of Cameroon, Tanzania and the Swahili-speaking regions of Africa. Broadly synchronic perspectives (which nevertheless take cognizance of developmental determinants) range over dominant genres — poetry, short fiction and the novel, children's literature, theatre, film - and cover indigene literatures (Australian Aboriginal, Maori, First Nations) and regional creativity in West, East and South Africa, the Caribbean, India and the South-East Asian diaspora, and the settler colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Authors treated within broader frameworks include Chinua Achebe, 'Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Bole Butake, Shashi Deshpande, Louis Esson, Lorna Goodison, Patricia Grace, Bland Holt, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rita Kleinhart, Hanif Kureishi, Werewere Liking, Timothy Mo, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Ruby Slipperjack. There are self-testimonies from the writers Geoff Goodfellow, Darrelyn Gunzburg and Don Mattera, poems by David Dabydeen, Geoff Goodfellow and Olive Senior. Of particular value to this collection are the perspectives offered by African, Caribbean and Eastern European contributors.