Bücher der Reihe Contemporary World Writers

R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of "e;authentic"e; Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan's writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan's imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan's career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan's fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

This is the most comprehensive study to date of Amy Tan's work, offering close readings of her texts in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality. In contrast with Tan's own American-born narrator, and mainstream critics, Bella Adams looks beyond the stereotypes which appear in Tan's books, and explores the ways in which Chinese immigrants and their American relatives struggle to understand each other's "best qualities" via the Chinese tradition of the "talk story." She emphasizes Tan's American narrators' process of becoming Chinese and discovering "real China," and the significance of the ironic staging of these moments.

The first complete study of Ishiguro's work from "A Pale View of the Hills" to "When We Were Orphans," this book explores the centrality of dignity and displacement in Ishiguro's vision, and teases out the connotations of home and homelessness in his fictions. Barry Lewis focuses on such key questions as: How Japanese is Ishiguro?; What role does memory and unreliability play in his narratives?; Why was "The Unconsoled" understood to be such a radical break from the earlier novels?

This is a revised and expanded edition of Woodcock's accessible study, now including detailed readings of Carey's latest novels, 'Jack Maggs' and 'True History of the Kelly Gang'.

Touching on global issues such as violence, sexual abuse, gender, performativity, marginality, migration and human rights, Abani's work testifies to the centrality of his literary voice in the contemporary literary panorama. This book shows how aesthetics overlaps with ethics and how forms of extreme abuse may coexist with love and redemption. -- .

In this critical study of Les Murray's work Steven Matthews provides a complete picture of his career to date, from its early parables of national emergence to the working man's epic encounter with the major events of the 20th century, "Fredy Neptune".

John Thieme provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts - Caribbean, European and other - which have shaped him as a writer.

A major new study of Africa's most important writer, offering a comprehensive reassessment of Achebe's work as a novelist, broadcaster and political thinker -- .

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist to both ethnic and feminist discourses.

In this comprehensive critical study of Kureishi's work Bart Moore-Gilbert provides a detailed account of his work to date. The author locates Kureishi's work securely in its historical, social, cultural and critical contexts, as well as providing detailed readings of all the major works.

In this comprehensive and lucid critical study, Andrew Teverson examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure.

Don Randall's comprehensive study situates acclaimed author David Malouf within the field of contemporary international and psotcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author's affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, but also engages with the full body of preceding Malouf criticism.

An introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, this text focuses on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. It approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history.

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies making this book both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial', in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Aimed at students and the general reader, this book is an ideal introduction to one of contemporary literature's most fascinating writers.

This book examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and has recently published what she has announced will be her final novel. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

This study - the first of its kind - situates Rohinton Mistry's writing in its cultural and historical context. It explores key features, such as the legacy of Zoroastrianism, Parsi anglophilia, recent Indian history, and the Persian and European narrative traditions on which Mistry draws to produce his distinctive postcolonial fictions.

This study of the work of Alice Munro explores the appeal of her fictions of small-town Canada with their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossip and scandal.

Patrick William's lucid analysis offers the most up-to-date study of Ngugi's writing, including his most rcent collection of essays. Ngugi is one of the most important novelists on the contemporary world stage, and someone whose name has for many become synonymous with cultural controversy and political struggle. -- .