The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.

'This excellent collection of essays engages fully and seriously with the wealth, complexity, and variety of British writing created by authors of African, Asian and Caribbean descent. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to acknowledge and understand the diversity of British literature and culture and its development over the past 250 years.'

Lyn Innes - Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures, University of Kent

'This groundbreaking book of essays is a must-have for all editors, critics and literary editors who need to know this literary history, and all university and other libraries, and writers and readers.'

Bernardine Evaristo - Brunel University, London

‘This outstanding feat of collective scholarship offers not only a wealth of information and an easily accessible reference base, but also a state-of-the art survey with a wide array of incisive interventions in scholarly debates that are likely to have a long-lasting impact on the study of Black and Asian British Writing.’

Frank Schulze-Engler Source: Anglistik

‘This outstanding feat of collective scholarship offers not only a wealth of information and an easily accessible reference base, but also a state-of-the art survey with a wide array of incisive interventions in scholarly debates that are likely to have a long-lasting impact on the study of Black and Asian British Writing. This History is clearly a must-have: for any library with holdings on British, Anglophone and Postcolonial literature and for any scholar researching or teaching in these fields.’

Frank Schulze-Engler Source: Anglistik

‘The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing is a welcome compilation … The essays in the volume are generally well written and balanced.’

Vaibhav Iype Parel Source: ariel: A Review of International English Literature

‘This new Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing will be greatly useful to students and teachers in a variety of fields beyond postcolonial and decolonial studies: intellectual history, literary theory, performance studies, Black Studies, area studies, print culture studies, media studies, diaspora studies. The numerous contributions to this landmark volume … [invite] readers to re-consider the asymmetries at the heart of the colonial power relation, but also to consider the blurred lines between what could be seen as strictly European and what is clearly transnational, transcultural and diasporic.’

Source: Commonwealth Essays and Studies