Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors

By Elleke Boehmer

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192892320
• ISBN13: 9780192892324
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 0.9" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Excellent introduction to postcolonial studies

Elleke Boehmer's "Colonial And Postcolonial Literature" is an excellent introduction to postcolonial literature/studies/theory. Her exposition of literary and theoretical landmarks in the field should be helpful for all who wish to first look at a snapshot of the field and then proceed to reading in depth. Much has happened since the book first appeared (and there is a second edition which I have not checked) but it still is a very good first introductory volume, as Boehmer writes with remarkable clarity.