Postcolonial imaginings

David Punter

"This book provides new perspectives on a wide range of writers, and at the same time provides a radically new development of many of the most pertinent issues in the field of postcolonial writing and theory. It constitutes a new engagement between the 'postcolonial' and a conception of the literary which is richly innovative in its deployment of psychoanalytic, deconstructive and other approaches to the text." "The book begins with some brief background to the issue of decolonisation and its contemporary effects. It is informed throughout by a clear sense of literary and political context, within which chosen texts - by well-known writers (Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite) as well as less well-known ones (Joan Riley, Susan Power, Abdulrazak Gurnah) and writers not often seen in a postcolonial context (James Kelman, Seamus Deane, Hanif Kureishi) - can be situated. The chapters which follow are based around themes such as violent geographics; hallucination, dream and the exotic; mourning and melancholy; diaspora and exile; delocalisation and the alibi. This new approach to the complexities of the postcolonial allows the reader to appreciate some of the richness, but at the same time the political and cultural ambivalence, which underlies postcolonial writing."--BOOK JACKET.