The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction: Foreign Fields that are Forever England

   1. Introduction: Foreign Fields that are Forever England

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 1-28

3. Legacies of Empire in the English Countryside

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 29-29

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   2. The Politics of Postimperial Melancholia and Rural Heritage in the 1980s: W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 31-56

   3. Rural Routes of Empire, Colonial Nostalgia and the Thatcher Years: V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 57-83

   4. Racism and the English Countryside: Contemporary Black Britain in David Dabydeen’s Disappearance and Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 84-113

4. Legacies of Empire in the Postcolonial Rural

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 115-115

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   2. Towards a Provincial Cosmopolitanism: Amitava Kumar’s Bombay, London, New York

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 117-144

   3. A Distinctly Uncosmopolitan Present: The Postcolonial Rural in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 145-177

   4. Historicising Neocolonial Globalisation and Political Revolution: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 178-207

5. Conclusion: Local Futures, Global Fissures

   1. Conclusion: Local Futures, Global Fissures

      • Lucienne Loh

      Pages 208-214

6. Back Matter

   Pages 215-255

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By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial globalisation on postcolonial rural spaces.

• critique
• English literature
• Great Britain
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Liverpool, UK

  Lucienne Loh

Lucienne Loh is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brunel University and Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published a number of articles on postcolonial literature and theory as well as on contemporary British literature. She helped to establish the Postcolonial Studies Association in 2008 and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

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