Studies in English Literatures

In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture ...

This monograph examines Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997), a novel exploring recurring expressions of exclusion and discrimination throughout history with particular focus on Jewish and African diasporas and the storytelling of its migrant characters. Particular attention is given ...

The dynamic between the biographer and the subject is, perhaps, one of the most fascinating aspects of biography as a genre. How does the biographer stage the illusion that is the narrative life, the illusion that the subject assumes a living form through words? In contrast to purely fictional ...

This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight`s Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor`s The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri`s ...

In a collection of sixteen essays, Gagiano addresses more than twenty texts from various African regions and periods. The works discussed here range from transcriptions of ancient (Khoikhoi/San) folktales to some of the classic texts of the African English literary canon and include recent ...

This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social ...

When the SS Empire Windrush berthed at Tilbury docks in 1948 with 492 ex-servicemen from the Caribbean, it marked the beginning of the post-war migrations to Britain that would form part of modern, multicultural Britain. A significant role in this social transformation would be played by the ...

The twelve contributors to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric “new readings” as ...

Gianluca Delfino’s study is based on the assumption that Wilson Harris’s works as a whole show a remarkable unity of thought rooted in their author’s complex imagination. As a valuable contribution to Caribbean Literature and Philosophy, Harris’s imaginative approach to reality is ...

Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in contemporary Anglophone novels – Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Pat ...