Anglophone Fiction Research Articles

Anglophone Fiction in Swaziland: A Preliminary Study

Literature in Swaziland is a relatively recent phenomenon, and literary production by Swazi writers in siSwati and in English is somewhat limited. In turn, only minimal scholarly attention has been directed towards the nation's literature. This article offers a preliminary study of selected anglophone fiction, situating the texts within the genre of popular literature and examining how institutional and cultural forces have influenced its production and reception. I find that the generic constraints of the popular novel form often inhibit any real critique of oppressive paternalism embedded in local custom and tradition, while the more fully individualized short fiction attempts various forms of intervention. As a result, the authors produce contradictory visions of a postindependence Swaziland across their fiction, as their novels conform to the conventional demands of a publishing house concerned primarily with marketing educational texts, while their more textured short fiction often displays a marked ambivalence towards traditional structures.

Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (review)

Reviewed by: Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies Russ Castronovo Paul Jay . Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. xi + 231 pp. As literary studies veers toward the transnational, readers and critics are encountering a set of generative but also potentially confusing conceptual markers: multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, world systems, border studies. What are the relationships among these terms, and how do they intersect with economic and cultural imperatives in which all routes seemingly lead to a universal marketplace? In this cogent book, Paul Jay undertakes a critical road map of this complex intellectual terrain by first clarifying the insights of major theorists in these fields and then looking to see how these insights are mirrored—or, in a few cases, distorted—in exemplary works of contemporary Anglophone fiction from Europe, Africa, and the Asian subcontinent. Since the transnational, in its twists and turns, is for Jay primarily about diasporas and other flows, it is perhaps not overly helpful to say that a novel is from any one location. Global Matters likewise refuses any single position that would simplify these vectors, on the one hand, by equating globalization with Westernization or, on the other, reading the particularity of minority expression as somehow triumphantly resistant to the homogenizing pull of a worldwide cultural marketplace. Instead, this is a book about multiple positions, such as those staked out in theory and criticism by Arjun Appadurai, Ania Loomba, Masao Miyoshi, and Edward Said. And it is also about the work of writers such as Junot Díaz, Mohsin Hamid, Zakes Mda, and Zadie Smith. Global Matters balances these twin aims with a two-part structure. Part one is titled "Globalization and the Study of Literature" and examines what critics of globalization have described and theorized. Part two is titled "Globalization in Contemporary Literature" and explores how fiction writers have imagined and reflected upon the bodies, customs, traditions, and identities set in motion by global forces. In Jay's view, balance is needed because within literary and cultural studies the turn toward the transnational has often been so sharp and sudden that a critical middle ground has been left in the [End Page 792] dust. Thus some commentators—Jay is thinking of Simon Gikandi and Harry Harootunian—describe globalization as primarily a cultural phenomenon, while others have overemphasized its economic determinations. Jay refuses to banish considerations of either cultural or economic factors: "Culture is a set of material practices linked to economies, and economic and material relations are always mediated by cultural factors and forms" (45). Indeed, without such a measured defense of culture, which would have to include cultural objects like the novels that Jay reads in part two of the book, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand globalization as something other than economic agglomeration. At the same time, however, critics, especially those from the humanities, need to remember the "reality of economic globalization" lest they "too glibly" generate claims about culture's "liberatory" potential (46). The speed of the new economy, according to internet guru Kevin Kelly, is unprecedented, much as the pace of what Manuel Castells calls "the network society" always seems to be accelerating. Although Global Matters is not concerned, as these writers are, with infrastructures that keep globalization humming at a lively pace, Jay acknowledges that while globalization has been evolving since the sixteenth century, its speed under late capitalism has meant that cultural difference has come to the attention of scholars that much more quickly. In this sense, then, Global Matters represents an effort to slow down not the transnational turn itself, but the rate at which writers and critics generate overarching or even final assessment of new economic and cultural configurations. Jay wants to pause to sort out competing critical positions, and to take stock of theoretical developments even as the aligned forces of economic globalization and cultural migration continue surging ahead. Novels are ideal for this task. They are slow objects, which, to steal a line from bluesman Willie Dixon, are "built for comfort" and "ain't built for speed." Even as books like Mda's The Heart of Redness or Kiran Desai's The Inheritance...

Climate change in literature and literary criticism

AbstractThis article provides an overview of climate change in literature, focusing on the representation of climate change in Anglophone fiction. It then evaluates the way in which these fictional representations are critiqued in literary studies, and considers the extent to which the methods and tools that are currently employed are adequate to this new critical task. We explore how the complexity of climate change as both scientific and cultural phenomenon demands a corresponding degree of complexity in fictional representation. For example, when authors represent climate change as a global, networked, and controversial phenomenon, they move beyond simply employing the environment as a setting and begin to explore its impact on plot and character, producing unconventional narrative trajectories and innovations in characterization. Then, such creative complexity asks of literary scholars a reassessment of methods and approaches. For one thing, it may require a shift in emphasis from literary fiction to genre fiction. It also particularly demands that environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, moves beyond its long‐standing interest in concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘place’, to embrace a new understanding of the local in relation to the global. We suggest, too, that there are synergies to be forged between these revisionary moves in ecocriticism and developments in literary critical theory and historicism, as these critical modes begin to deal with climate change and reimagine themselves in turn.WIREs Clim Change2011 2 185–200 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.105This article is categorized under:Trans‐Disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts

The Bildungsroman in Cameroon Anglophone Literature: John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across The Mongolo and Margaret Afuh’s Born Before Her Time

This paper investigates the bildungsroman genre in postcolonial Cameroon Anglophone fiction through a textual analysis of John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo and Margaret Afuh’s Born before Her Time. It seeks to show that these two writers have borrowed a foreign genre and successfully manipulated its original template to highlight the problems between the individuals’ aims and the socio-cultural, political and economic values of the post colony. It also aims at demonstrating that a close reading of these texts deepens our understanding of the bildungsroman in the Cameroon literary context and its inevitable relationship to questions of identity.

Postmodernism in Reverse: American National Allegories and the 21st-Century Political Novel

Research Article| December 01 2011 Postmodernism in Reverse: American National Allegories and the 21st-Century Political Novel Caren Irr Caren Irr Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2011) 57 (3-4): 516–538. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2011-4005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Caren Irr; Postmodernism in Reverse: American National Allegories and the 21st-Century Political Novel. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2011; 57 (3-4): 516–538. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2011-4005 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Who wants to be a cosmopolitan?

This article explores two political discourses—composite culture and cosmopolitanism—as divergent, indeed competing, modes of advocating cultural pluralism. The first part of the article considers the genealogy of each construct and explores the theoretical differences between the two. The second part turns to the question of how composite culture and cosmopolitanism are configured in narrative terms in recent works of fiction and film. The primary focus is on Hindi author Manzoor Ahtesham’s 1986 novel Sukha Bargad (A Dying Banyan in English translation). The novel illustrates the withering of composite culture from the perspective of a brother and sister growing up in post-Independence Bhopal. To provide a comparative framework, two recent works of Anglophone fiction are drawn into the discussion: Aravind Adiga’s novel White Tiger (2008) and Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, the basis for the movie Slumdog Millionaire. These texts may be read as critiques of cosmopolitanism from the subaltern position. The article asks whether composite culture and cosmopolitanism remain relevant in neo-liberalized India, while also calling for further research on these issues using literary texts in Hindi and Urdu.

Nadine Gordimer's the pickup and the desert romance tradition in post/colonial Anglophone fiction

The paper shows how Nadine Gordimer's novel The Pickup can be read as a radical reworking of the traditions of romance, most specifically of the colonial desert romance. E M Hull's novel The Sheik is discussed in order to highlight key patterns of this genre, particularly with reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ distinction between the female protagonist as hero or heroine. Whilst The Sheik begins by introducing the figure of Diana Mayo as a female hero on a quest for freedom from the constrictions of British patriarchy in the Algerian desert, by its conclusion the narrative has been androcentrically and colonially reconfigured so that Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan and his complex identity has become the centre of the narrative; moreover, the desert has become part of the narrative orchestration of this masculine centre. By contrast, in The Pickup, the female protagonist Julie Summers increasingly becomes the centre of the narrative in contrast to her husband Ibrahim, who is estranged from his desert homeland in his restless desire to become part of the world of western cities and affluence. Gordimer's novel gives the desert a polyvalent role, representing it, in contrast to human civilization, as temporally transcendent, but also as a mundane space adjacent to the debris of the everyday world, with which Julie becomes increasingly more familiar. In finally deciding not to obey her husband and accompany him on his migratory quest to the USA, Julie opts to stay with the desert and the community of relations she has established with Ibrahim's family, thus fully abandoning her role as heroine in a romance‐centred plot.

A Hundred Years of Fiction by Stephen Knight

MLR, IO1.3,2oo6 839 A Hundred Years of Fiction. By STEPHEN KNIGHT. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2004. xviii+217 pp. /30 (pbk ,15.99). ISBN 0-7083-I847-9 (pbk 0-7083-I846-o). Stephen Knight's book has succeeded in launching with a bang the new critical series 'WritingWales inEnglish': the systematic thoroughness of its adoption of postcolonial theoretical perspectives in analysing Welsh material has provoked an outcry. Welsh Labour historian Dai Smith, reviewing the book in the New Welsh Review, 66 (Winter 2004), pp. 22-29, damns it as a 'farrago' of 'nonsense'; though he admits its author to be a 'gifted critic', this book, he claims, is 'not intellectually tenable'. But of course what is in dispute here is amatter of contemporary politics asmuch as of literature or history: categorizing devolved Wales as postcolonial is likely to lead to seeing it as needing greater independent powers, an issue on which theWelsh Labour Party is currently divided. At least such a response indicates that this book has already fulfilled its first stated aim of provoking debate about writers hitherto neglected in their own country as well as elsewhere. Stephen Knight presents the anglophone fiction ofWales as having passed through three stages during the twentieth century. Up till the late I920S, he suggests, itwas still dominated by the type of romance which had come into vogue during the second half of the nineteenth century, which introduced the Welsh to an English audience, sometimes with sympathy and sometimes with derision but always as strange, as 'other'. By contrast, in the 1930S and I940s the bulk of English language fiction fromWales focused in realist mode on the struggles of the coal-mining communities during the years of economic depression and labour resistance; largely authored by members of those communities, it sought to understand Welsh industrial experience from the workers' perspective. Though still published in England, by such presses as Gollancz and Laurence andWishart, its intended audience was the international left-wing sympathizer, including by now amajority English-speaking Welsh populace, the numbers ofWelsh speakers having dropped dramatically during the first decades of the century. 'Integration and independence' are the keynotes of the third, most recent and still ongoing phase, according toKnight's analysis-that is, the forging within English-language fiction of a sense ofWelsh identity in touch with traditional Welsh-speaking culture, and a concomitant sense of cultural independence freed from the shades of a colonized mentality. The growth of grant-assisted Welsh presses has also meant that since the I96os it has been possible to publish much of this new material inWales. Adopting a terminology familiar to postcolonial analysis, Knight labels the first type of writing 'first-contact' romance and the second the writing of the 'industrial settlement'. These labels are admittedly somewhat problematic: they are more ob viously suited to the type of settler colony inwhich it is the settlers rather than the native inhabitants who produce the literature. Virtually all the writers whose work Knight analyses were ethnically Welsh; writers of the first phase, such asAllen Raine or Caradoc Evans, for all that they aimed to introduce Wales to readers unfamiliar with it,were not themselves recent incomers but natives of the country. And though Wales was second, by rate, only to the USA as aworld centre of immigration dur ing the first decade of the twentieth century, the ancestors of those novelists who contributed to Knight's second phase, such as Rhys Davies or Gwyn Thomas, had for the most part moved to settle in industrial Wales from ruralWelsh areas, rather than from England or elsewhere. The time-scale ofWelsh colonization is unusually protracted: conquered and settled in the thirteenth century, not until the nineteenth does the indigenous culture of the mass of the population really suffer serious ero sion, a factor which complicates the application of postcolonial theory to the resultant twentieth-century English-language literature ofWales. But it by no means negates 840 Reviews the insights that such an approach offers into the struggle of creating a literature of one's own in a language which was initially the invaders'. On the contrary, the highly innovative theoretical framework provided here convincingly succeeds...

Distance between You and Your Home: The Estrangement of Postcolonial Writing

This essay argues that the writing of postcolonial migrant authors has been critically deployed in such a way that it appears to vindicate a long standing romantic ideology of artistic detachment. In order to present an alternative account, the field of Nigerian anglophone fiction is examined here and the experiences of two aspiring authors offered as case-studies. It is argued that their experience, and the wider circumstances of Nigerian cultural production, demonstrate that postcolonial migrant writing is not an expression of ‘aesthetic alienation’, but of the estrangement that Marx recognised as a subjective consequence of capitalism.

Heritage as Nightmare: the Novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah from Zanzibar has emerged since the early 1990s as one of the most important new voices in East African Anglophone fiction. This article seeks to emphasise the new perspectives opened up by a type of writing which transcends the tendency of certain cultural nationalist authors to approach questions of colonial heritage in terms of a binary logic inspired by the confrontational theories of Frantz Fanon. Gurnah belongs to another generation whose apprehension of the hybrid nature of the contemporary world is informed by the nomadic experience of forced or self-imposed exile in the West.

Aesthetics of Subjectivity, Ethics of “Otherness”: Modernism and Anglophone Fiction by Indian Women

"Aesthetics of Subjectivity, Ethics of “Otherness”: Modernism and Anglophone Fiction by Indian Women." South Asian Review, 23(2), pp. 27–28

The stepmother tongue: an introduction to new Anglophone fiction

The stepmother tongue: an introduction to new Anglophone fiction

Nuruddin Farah: A Tale of Two Trilogies

less through his first two novels. From a Crooked Rib and A Naked Needle, as impressive as these are as novelistic debuts, than from the next three, Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame, which form a trilogy Farah has named Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship. These three novels were published in relatively quick succession, appearing between 1979 and 1983. The pace of Farah's production as a novelist has slowed: Maps, the first installment of a second trilogy, appeared in 1986, but its successor novels, Gifts and Secrets, were published in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Although contemporary African writers have linked their works together in a number of ways (Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease coming to mind as one example), Farah is unique in anglophone African writing and in postcolonial anglophone fiction in general in utilizing the trilogy as a form, not just once but twice. A number of questions are posed by the centrality of these two trilogies to Farah's oeuvre. What attracts him to the form of the trilogy? How do these novels work together to form a trilogy? Do the two trilogies work the same way? What continuities are there between them, what resemblances, what departures? These questions take on a fresh form with the completion of the second, as yet unnamed trilogy; so they are worth asking upon the present occasion as we celebrate the awarding of the 1998 Neustadt Prize to this fascinating and unique writer. Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship is a very different kind of title from the striking titles of the individual books which constitute the first