Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors

by Elleke Boehmer

Wole Soyinka, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee--postcolonial writers from around the world now enjoy wide popularity. This book is a challenging look at the history of such writing, how it developed and how it departs from writing in the British Empire in the Victorian
period. Boehmer focuses throughout on key themes and images--journeying, loss, the search for community, the arrival of the stranger--expanding and redefining them with reference to a broad range of texts, from Trollope, Kipling, Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield, to authors as recent
as Ben Okri and Michael Ondaatje, and the Aboriginal Australians Sally Morgan and Mudrooroo.

Genres: Nonfiction, Post Colonial, History, Theory, Literary Criticism, Contemporary, Criticism

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Neer]

A lucid overview of literature that came with colonisation and left its impact even when colonisation as a physical reality came to an end.
*

First Line: This is a book about the writing of empire, and about writing in opposition to empire.

[Carla]

Great explanations of the main topics surrounding (Post)Colonialism and the authors who have become essential in the field. Moreover, the writing is extremely easy to follow, which is appreciated when dealing with complex topics.

[Iñaki Tofiño]

Absolutely amazing scholarship about colonial and postcolonial literatures!
Finally somebody goes beyond the postcolonial to the colonial and describes tropes, ways, methods... which help us understand imperial rhetoric and how it affected (and affects) colonized territories, each one with their own particularities. Besides the excellent content, Boehmer's prose is easy readable, well constructed, far from the post-structuralist jargon so dear to some postcolonial scholars.

[Letizia]

a solid 3.5

[Arianna Pappone]

Biased but well written and insightful

[aml]

Excellent overview to postcolonial literature studies .