Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures) - Softcover

Walder, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415628296 ISBN 13: 9780415628297

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

Synopsis

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition ― nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world, and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of "Bushman" song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

About this title

About the Author

Dennis Walder is Professor of Literature at the Open University. His publications include Dickens and Religion, Athol Fugard (whose work he has also edited), Post-Colonial Literatures in English, and the bestselling reader Literature in the Modern World.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415628296
• ISBN 13: 9780415628297
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214