Abstract
In 1995, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to an Irish poet, Seamus Heaney; in 1993, it was won by an African American novelist, Toni Morrison, and in 1992, by a poet and dramatist from St Lucia, Derek Walcott. The 1991 award went to South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, the 1986 one to Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka. Having once honoured Winston Churchill and Pearl Buck, but never Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, the Swedish Academy is by no means infallible, although there are welcome signs of critical sophistication and cultural awareness in the recent recognition of English-language writers outside the mainstream British and American traditions. All of the authors in question may be placed within the broad literary category variously known as World Literature in English, the New Literatures in English, Post-Colonial Literature, or (with certain exceptions) Commonwealth Literature.
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Further Reading
The classic introduction to post-colonial literature is The Empire Writes Back (Routledge, 1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin; the same authors have also produced a compendium of texts (many heavily abridged) entitled The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Routledge, 1995). Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford, 1995) is ultimately more “colonial” than “post-colonial” in scope, and complements rather than supplants The Empire Writes Back.
The two leading theorists in the field are still Homi K. Bhabha, editor of the essay collection Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990), and author in his own right of The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of In Other Worlds (Routledge, 1988) and The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (Routledge, 1990). If one reads only one critical study in the field, however, this must be Edward Said’s highly accessible Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1993).
The hegemony of current theoretical orthodoxy is challenged both by Aijad Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, 1992), which drives a few neat wedges between (so-called) “post-” and (de facto) “neo” colonial studies; and by Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992), emphasizing complicity rather than conflict in colonial and post-colonial relations.
The comprehensive From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, edited by Anna Rutherford (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992) is not, as its title might suggest, a record of changing theoretical paradigms, but a fine selection of papers from the Silver Jubilee conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (University of Kent at Canterbury, 1989). It gives a good idea of the range and depth of scholarly activity in the field. A more representative collection of essays generated by post-colonial theory is the recent
New National and Post-Colonial Literatures. An Introduction, edited by Bruce King (Oxford University Press, 1996).
In an explicitly linguistic context, The Story of English (Faber, 1988) may be supplemented by the more specialised English Around the World, edited by Jenny Cheshire (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and
A Survey of Modern English, by Stephan Gramley and Kurt-Michael Pätzold (Routledge, 1992). An invaluable source book is
Kenneth Katzner’s The Languages of the World (Routledge, 1986); a useful additional guide is
Suzanne Romaine’s Language in Society (Oxford University Press, 1994).
The present study draws frequently on interviews with writers themselves, whether read with or against the grain. Collections from specific regions are noted in the appropriate section, but the finest global collection is Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock’s Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), with anglophone novelists from five continents. [Please note that the Afterword contains more extended discussion of some of the works mentioned here.]
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© 1998 John Skinner
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Skinner, J. (1998). Introduction. In: The Stepmother Tongue. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_1
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