Canon of Commonwealth Literature

Contributed articles on English literature from Commonwealth countries.

The present volume contains general essays on: unequal African/Western academic exchange; the state and structure of postcolonial studies; representing male violence in Zimbabwe’s wars; parihaka in the poetic imagination of Aotearoa New Zealand; Middle Eastern, Nigerian, Moroccan, and diasporic Indian women’s writing; community in post-Independence Maltese poetry in English; key novels of the Portuguese colonies; the TV series The Kumars at No. 42; fictional representations of India; the North in western Canadian writing; and a pedagogy of African-Canadian literature. As well as these, there is a selection of poems from Malta by Daniel Massa, Adrian Grima, Norbert Bugeja, Immanuel Mifsud, and Maria Grech Ganado, and essays providing close readings of works by the following authors and filmmakers: Thea Astley, George Elliott Clarke, Alan Duff, Francis Ebejer, Lorena Gale, Romesh Gunesekera, Sahar Khalīfah, Anthony Minghella, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe, Salman Rushdie, Ghādah al-Sammān, Meera Syal, Lee Tamahori. Contributors: Leila Abouzeid, Hoda Barakat, Amrit Biswas, Thomas Bonnici, Stella Borg Barthet, Ivan Callus, Devon Campbell–Hall, Saviour Catania, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Crow, Pilar Cuder–Domínguez, Bärbel Czennia, Hilary P. Dannenberg, Pauline Dodgson–Katiyo, Bernadette Falzon, Daphne Grace, Adrian Grima, Kifah Hanna, Janne Korkka, T. Vijay Kumar, Chantal Kwast–Greff, Maureen Lynch Pèrcopo, Kevin Stephen Magri, Isabel Moutinho, Melanie A. Murray, Taiwo Oloruntoba–Oju, Gerhard Stilz, Jesús Varela Zapata, Christine Vogt–William.

This collection of essays addresses questions pertinent to the teaching of the relatively new discipline surrounding the teaching and researching of African literature. A valuable resource for both researchers, lecturers and students, it examines current practices, considers which material and writers should be studied, and considers how academic programmes can be structured.

Until recent years oratory was considered a fundamental component of the literature of a nation, and a liberal education implied a knowledge of the great speakers and their principal speeches no less than of the important poems, plays and prose works. For some time, however, the study of literature has been reduced in many places to just two genres: poetry and prose fiction; but of late literary studies have expanded considerably, to include speeches, children's and juvenile literature, historiography, diaries and journals, memoirs, letters, science and fantasy fiction -- even graffiti and inscriptions. Increasingly, papers on Commonwealth speakers are heard at national and international conferences and found in scholarly journals, and the speeches of famous persons are studied with the same intensity as their imaginative works. As a result, rhetorical theories and communication studies have developed rapidly in order to better evaluate speeches, or public address. The papers included in this collection suggest the range of studies of Commonwealth public address: historical, comparative, analytical and survey. They examine the effectiveness of some of the major figures in world affairs: G K Goldhale and B G Tilak (India); Jessie Street and R G Menzies (Australia); Maurice Bishop (Grenada) and Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham (Guyana). In addition, dig consider African and Canadian oratory and the relationship of speeches to history and politics, concluding with a proposed canon of Commonwealth public address.

This multi-genre collection of chapters presents the dramatic transformation of English Studies in India since the early 1990s. It showcases the shift from the study of mainly British literature and language to a more versatile terrain of multilingualism, culture, performance, theory, and the literary Global South. Tracing this transition, the volume discusses themes like Indian literary history, postcolonial theory, post-pandemic challenges to literary studies, the state of Indian English drama, vernacular literature in English Studies and pedagogy, translations of feminist writers from South Asia, caste, and othering in literature, among other key themes. The volume, with contributions from eminent English Studies scholars, not only reflects the altered terrain of English Language and Literature in India but also invites readers to think about the transformative potential of the present juncture for both literary imagination and literary studies. This timely book, in honour of Professor GJV Prasad, will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English Studies, cultural studies, literature, comparative literature, translation studies, postcolonial studies, and critical theory.