Postcolonial criticism

In recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was…

This is a well-intentioned and sometimes well-written study, a book that one wants to like, coming as it does from a place that has not figured prominently in anglophone mappings of postcolonial writing: Tunisia. In some ways it is unexpected…

Almost ten years ago, a spate of edited books in Canada by the academics Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars brought important insights from the then-vibrant field ofpostcolonial literary studies to bear on questions about Canadian literature. Their work rigorously examined…

Perhaps one of the most remarkable features of postcolonial criticism is its seemingly endless capacity for self-critique. Matching, if not eclipsing, the charges laid against the field by critics of postcoloniahsm, postcolonial critics themselves typically display an acute awareness that…

Was it just a matter of time? Do all political criticisms eventually meet? These musings are prompted by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin's new book on postcolonial ecocriticism. One can only be glad that the two words in the title…

Realism, as this useful comparative study reminds us, is the most problematical and paradoxical of dramatic styles. As an aesthetic, theatrical or even political programme, it is inherently unattainable: the representational codes of performance ensure that the more 'real '…

This essay considers three novels which each bear the word ‘pioneer’ in their titles: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Pioneers (1915). The three novels, although moving widely across time…