Anastasia Valassopoulos

Robert Spencer

Howard J. Booth

This introduction to British literature from 1900 to 2021 looks at British writing from the perspective of the 2016 Brexit vote and its seismic repercussions. The book covers a wide variety of British literature in order to expose the cultural and political history of Britain, its repeated challenges and highly class-bound, patriarchal structure. British Writing from Empire to Brexit: Writing, Identity, and Nation offers a stark view of what British culture has come to represent, and the repercussions. Not shying away from discussions around imperialism, nationalism, and racism, Robert Spencer, Howard J. Booth, and Anastasia Valassopoulos offer a radical deconstruction of what Britishness can, and should, mean, promoting a convincing and accessible way to rethink the texts and field. The authors analyse novels, poetry, and prose which amplify the dissentient and dissident perspectives of women, gender non-conforming, and queer authors, as well as the varied viewpoints and insights of working-class, immigrant, postcolonial, Black, and Asian writers, showing how these works open up post-national futures after empire and after Brexit. Ultimately offering a model to rescue Britain from its current crises and anxieties, this book is an essential read for anyone approaching the study of British literature and culture, as well as those working on postcolonial studies, decolonisation, recent British history and politics, or with an interest in empire and Brexit.

Writing, Identity, and Nation

British Writing from Empire to Brexit

This book engages with contemporary Arab women writers from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Algeria. In spite of Edward Said’s groundbreaking reappraisal of the uneven relationship between the West and the Arab world in Orientalism, there has been little postcolonial criticism of Arab writing. Anastasia Valassopoulos raises the profile of Arab women writers by examining how they negotiate contexts and experiences that have come to be identified with postcoloniality such as the preoccupation with Western feminism, political conflict and war, the social effects of non-conformity and female empowerment, and the negotiation of influential cultural discourses such as orientalism. Contemporary Arab Women Writers revitalizes theoretical concepts associated with feminism, gender studies and cultural studies, and explores how art history, popular culture, translation studies, psychoanalysis and news media all offer productive ways to associate with Arab women’s writing that work beyond a limiting socio-historical context. Discussing the writings of authors including Ahdaf Soueif, Nawal El Saadawi, Leila Sebbar, Liana Badr and Hanan Al-Shaykh, this book represents a new direction in postcolonial literary criticism that transcends constrictive monothematic approaches.

Cultural Expression in Context

Contemporary Arab Women Writers

Postcolonial Locations seeks to clarify the meaning of ‘the postcolonial’ through close textual readings, and prioritises material and located readings over more abstract theoretical discussions; it seeks to re-orient the field by providing practical explorations of what the discipline is for. The book begins with an introduction of the key theoretical debates in the field – between the universal and the particular; the global and the local – but it then goes on to demonstrate, via a series of close textual readings, that these distinctions are not always useful and that we can achieve a more comprehensive and complete reading of the multiple times, places and texts in which colonial power is both exerted and fought. An engaging and comprehensive guide to contemporary postcolonial studies, this book is essential reading for students as well as professors.

New Issues and Directions in Postcolonial Studies

Postcolonial Locations

Fiona Tolan

Stephen Morton

This is a major new collection of essays on literary and cultural representations of migration and terrorism, the cultural impact of 9/11, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. The collection commences with analyses of the relationship between migration and terrorism, which has been the focus of much mainstream political and media debate since the attacks on America in 2001 and the London bombings in 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the criminalisation of ‘minority’ groups. Responding to the consequent erosion of the liberal democratic rights of the individual, leading scholars assess the various ways in which literary texts support and/or interrogate the conflation of narratives of transnational migration and perceived terrorist threats to national security. This crucial debate is furthered by contrasting analyses of the manner in which novelists from the UK, North Africa, the US and Palestine have represented 9/11, exploring the event’s contexts and ramifications. This path-breaking study complicates the simplistic narratives of revenge and wronged innocence commonly used to make sense of the attacks and to justify the US response. Each novel discussed seeks to interrogate and analyse a discourse typically dominated by consent, belligerence and paranoia. Together, the collected essays suggest the value of literature as an effective critical intervention in the very fraught political aftermath of the ‘war on terror’. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Anastasia Valassopoulos

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