COLLEGE LITERATURE
a journal of critical literary studies
News
New book by David Johnson, Contributing Editor, on Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature, and the South African Nation
Drawing from a variety of primary texts, including works by early African nationalists, European literary figures and travel writers, as well as from courtroom testimony of Cape slaves and settlers, Johnson’s study explores how the political community of the Cape was imagined between the years 1770 and 1830. The book engages with contemporary postcolonial discourse, exposing pervasive political and economic equalities and challenging previous understandings of colonial forms of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance in the Cape. The book relates contemporary conceptions of the post-apartheid South African nation, identity, and culture to the literary and historical legacies of the Cape Colony.
Further details at Edinburgh University Press
New book by Graham MacPhee, Editor of College Literature, on Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies.
The journal's Editor, Graham MacPhee, has just published a new book with Edinburgh University Press, entitled Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. The book argues that the process of decolonization was far more uneven and contradictory than is often assumed, and needs to be understood as reinforcing the transition to a new structure of global hegemony as well as marking the end of formal colonialism. The study examines poetry, drama, and fiction as well as cultural criticism, theory, and political discourse, and discusses a wide range of writers from George Orwell, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin, to Sam Selvon, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tony Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Andrea Levy, Ian McEwan, and Leila Aboulela.
Further details at Edinburgh University Press (UK)
Further details at Columbia University Press (USA)
Graham MacPhee blog posting on 'Logics of Disintegration: Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Riots in Britain'
