Cambridge English and Commonwealth Literature

Abstract

Featuring the word ‘Commonwealth’ rather than the more fashionable ‘postcolonial’ in the title of this collection may be taken by some as provocatively conservative. Provocation is not the intention. It is put forward in the spirit promoted by Edward Said at the beginning of his Beginnings: ‘In this sense of its own difference, therefore, this book begins by explicitly venturing a particular ambition for itself, an ambition that finally becomes intelligible only in the book’s unfolding and not through first advancing some ideal type which it then seeks to fulfil.’1