Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace

Abstract

I have just made a series of connections between Derek Walcott’s aesthetic concerns, his established authorial tendencies, and the multiple social and political locations within which his career has developed. The case studies in Part II work in a similar way. My attention to writers’ biographies and their relationships to the literary marketplace is at odds with the notion, common throughout much of the twentieth century, and even now possessing some nostalgic power, that successful literature should register the absence of the author as its most apparent creator. As R. Jackson Wilson points out, through multiple influences from fin de siècle art for art’s sake ideology to New Critical formalism, from semiotics to poststructuralism, the ‘true artist’ has often been thought to operate as though ‘the cost of his success was a kind of self-denial, a successful withholding of the self from the work.’2