Is it possible to speak of island literatures in global, comparative terms? Are geography and colonial history both so influential that we can say that they have produced an identifiable body of postcolonial island literatures? This chapter explores methodologies for comparing island writing by turning to contemporary literature in English from the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific archipelagoes, foregrounding the important contributions made by island writers to postcolonial discourse and literature. Although one might arguably define every land mass on the globe as an island, this chapter focuses on the literary production of former European colonies in the global south, particularly tropical islands with plantation, diaspora and creolization histories, as well as indigenous literatures in white settler nations. Although the concerns explored here are not restricted to island contexts, this chapter suggests that the collusion of geography and history has made these particular issues more prevalent in contemporary island writing than in other bodies of postcolonial literature.

Colonial narratives and the tourist industry have long depicted island space as remote, isolated and peripheral to modernity. Yet island writers have demonstrated the ways in which centuries of transoceanic diaspora and settlement have rendered island spaces as vital and dynamic loci of cultural and material exchange. Contrary to the assumption that the privileged sites of history and modernity are continental (or generated from the British archipelago), many scholars have demonstrated that tropical islands and peoples were integral to the development of anthropology, botany, environmentalism, plantation capitalism, nuclear weapons and even the English novel.

What is postcolonial poetry? How is it like or unlike the postcolonial novel, postcolonial theory, and other related genres? What paradigms are most fruitful for interpreting it? To approach these questions, a bald synopsis of models for the analysis of, and recurrent themes within, postcolonial poetry may be a useful place to begin, before embarking on a more extended discussion of postcolonial poetry in the context of other genres with which it fuses, and against which its specificities can be tracked. For the purposes of this chapter, ‘postcolonial poetry’ means poetry written by non-European peoples in the shadow of colonialism, both after independence and in the immediate period leading up to it, particularly works that engage, however obliquely, issues of living in the interstices between Western colonialism and non-European cultures.

Decolonization has been a primary paradigm for conceptualizing postcolonial poetry, as made possible by critical works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chinweizu, Onwuchekwu Jemie and Ihechukwu Madibuike’s Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (1980), Kamau Brathwaite‘s History of the Voice (1984), and Robert Young’s Postcolonialism (2001). Decolonization movements swept across much of Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Caribbean and elsewhere, particularly from the time of Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 through the 1970s, the period when British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and other modern European colonial powers relinquished control over most of the earth’s surface.

Poetics and politics of the lyric poem

Distinguished by the expression of personal observations and feelings, the lyric poem is an introspective and self-reflexive form that seeks to give direct voice to individual consciousness, articulating its singular patterns of cognitions, desires and doubts. This self-expressive impulse is closely associated with Romanticism, and specifically with the Romantic projection of the internal life of a subject who is estranged from existing political institutions and social structures, turns to nature and natural philosophy for alternative systems of meaning and value, and takes this subjective revolt as the very material of poetry, striving, against the limits of language itself, for spontaneous and sincere utterance. For all their conceptual and stylistic differences, Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Shelley's ‘Adonais’ have in common the self-expressive impulse of a subject who seeks in nature an aesthetic understanding of the mind's symbolic relation with the real.

Whilst Romantic aspiration towards authentic individual expression has been subjected to the dislocations and ironic perspectives of modernism, it has continued to haunt modernism as an elusive possibility, a transitory achievement of consciousness, even where, as in Eliot's ‘Waste Land’, the myths that inform western culture are invoked in fragmentary form to constitute an aesthetic of loss. A more systematic challenge to Romantic subjectivity was formulated by late twentieth-century literary theory, specifically poststructuralist deconstructions of the expressive self and post-Marxist exposures of the ideological investments of poetic discourse. The latter, in particular, was influential in determining attitudes to the lyric poem in the apartheid period.

To speak of any ‘tradition’, let alone a ‘liberal’ tradition, in South African English fiction requires caution. In 1979 Stephen Gray considered that ‘tradition-making, in English South Africa, has often occurred fortuitously, rather than by any planned consciousness through which the writer has fused his or her own literature's past with contemporary stimuli’ (Southern African Literature, p. 7), and in 1994 Stephen Clingman concluded that there is ‘no aim or sense of building a novelistic tradition’, only ‘patterns of thematic accumulation’ (“Novel’, p. 1148). If the critical consensus has resisted the notion of a tradition, it has nevertheless ascribed a certain shape to the literary history of liberal fiction. Richard Rive, himself a liberal author, is one of many who consider Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) a ‘watershed’, soon after which ‘liberal writing was on the wane’ (‘Liberal Tradition’, pp. 31, 21). Paul Rich argues that between Beloved Country and Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World (1966) a ‘crisis at the heart of post-war South African liberalism’ gave rise to ‘a progressive loss of literary self-confidence’ that ‘produced an internal crisis of literary form’ (Hope and Despair, pp. 119–20; see also Rich, ‘Liberal Realism’), while Michael Vaughan describes the overturning of liberal hegemony in the 1970s by modernism and popular realism, represented respectively by J. M. Coetzee and Mtutuzeli Matshoba (“Literature and Politics’).

Southern African oral literature

Southern African oral literature has conventionally been grouped into three primary genres: oral poetry (praise poems and songs); narrativematerial (folktales, myths, legends, fables); and wisdom-lore (idioms, riddles and proverbs) (Lestrade, ‘Domestic and Communal Life’). An analysis of these various genres and how they relate to aspects of modern-day African existence such as music, gender, medicine, theatre, cinema, religion, politics and history can be found in my edited work, African Oral Literature (2001). This chapter begins by outlining some of the most important early works in the narrative genre of the folk-tale and then moves on to oral poetry, the main focus of this chapter.

A number of seminal works over the years have emphasised the importance of southern African oral literature and offered different approaches to analysis. A few of these dealing with the folk-tale in southern Africa are contained in my edited work, Foundations in Southern African Oral Literature (1993). Collected in that volume is a broad-based essay dating from 1930 by G. H. Franz, which deals generally with the preliterary period as well as the development of modern written literature in Lesotho. Franz looks at oral poetry, lithoko, as well as folktales, litsomo. He traces the development of Christian and school literature and includes a valuable analysis of writings concerning folklore and custom. In the same volume, P. D. Cole-Beuchat (1958) provides a contextualised analysis of various oral literary genres (riddles, folk-tales and proverbs) among the Tsonga-Ronga peoples.

This chapter explores Latin American discursive production responding to and accompanying European colonization in America. The time frame starts with pre-European Native narratives and concludes with formal political emancipation and the early foundations of the national states in the mid nineteenth century. I will focus on texts produced in Spanish and Portuguese, two of three major imperial languages of the subcontinent. The literature produced under the influence of French domination, including Haiti, will be addressed by other authors in this volume. Any survey of Latin Americamust not forget that indigenous cultures did not disappear at the moment of European arrival. They continued – and still continue – to produce culturally specific products, some of which address colonial circumstances. However, the literature produced in indigenous languages during this period constitutes an entirely different subject and can only be treated circumstantially in this chapter. Without being exhaustive, the chapter will nonetheless provide an introduction to the cultural history of the period by highlighting the significance of a number of key texts. These few texts are both representative and allow me to advance the argument that the American colonial experience inaugurates four motifs fundamental to our postcolonial present.

More than half a century after the publication in 1957 of Ian Watt's seminal study The Rise of the Novel, those who conceive of the origins and development of the English novel largely in evolutionary terms still do not seem fully to appreciate the challenge presented to the expectations of contemporary “novel and romance readers” by the publication towards the end of April 1719 of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner … Written by Himself. Daniel Defoe made strenuous efforts not only to distinguish his narratives from mere “Novels and Romances,” but also to convince his readers that what they were reading was “not a Story, but a History.” In itself, this particular ploy was not new. In the dedication to The Fair Jilt (1688), for instance, Aphra Behn maintained that “this little History” was not “Fiction,” but “Reality, and Matter of Fact, and acted in this our latter Age,” and most of Behn's immediate female successors, as Rosalind Ballaster has noted, tended to resort to this type of substantiating claim. However, in drawing his readers' attention in the prefaces to his narratives to the relationship between fact and fiction, Defoe emphasized the biographical element in his stories to an extent hitherto unheard of, and the response in the first half of the 1720s to the authenticating devices adopted in his series of spurious autobiographies appears to have been significantly difierent from that which occurred in the previous century.

After Jonathan Cape was issued with a summons to appear at Bow Street court in November 1928 for having published The Well of Loneliness, the novel's author, Radclyffe Hall, spent part of the tense wait for trial listening to her lover, Una Troubridge, reading aloud from Virginia Woolf's new book, Orlando. Hall's novel would be banned; Woolf's would not. The two works represent contrasting tendencies in queer fiction: in Hall, an engagement – albeit a pessimistic one – with the social given; in Woolf, an optimistic speculation on alternative possibilities.

The central character of Hall's book, Stephen Gordon, is lonely because she is an “invert” – that is her fate. Congenitally third-sexed, slim-hipped from the cradle, she and another woman of her own masculine kind could never love each other. Yet when she does fall in love with a suitably opposite, feminine woman, conscience forces her to give her up, because such a paragon of real womanhood as Mary Llewellyn can only be fulfilled by getting married to a man and bearing children. Although Stephen is presented as a case study, she is hardly typical. She is anomalous even within her own category of anomalies. Upper class and rich, expressing her author's deeply conservative attitudes to the ownership and husbandry of land, the hierarchy of social order, and the superiority of Englishness, she is disabled by the thought that her lesbianism excludes her from the enjoyment of her natural class privileges.

This chapter seeks to explore the interconnections between the philosophy of Black Consciousness in South Africa and English poetry published in the 1960s and 1970s by the four black African poets who, over the years, have been given the status of representing Black Consciousness by critics and editors of poetry anthologies. Taking the form of a wide-ranging critical overview, the chapter focuses on selected poems illustrating particular themes and perspectives, as well as poetic techniques and conventions in the poetry of this era.

Steven Bantu Biko's prophetic words quoted above remind us that Black Consciousness is essentially a philosophy of humanity (ubuntu) and national redemption. In line with his conception of Black Consciousness as a regenerative and redemptive philosophy, Biko's definition of blackness is both pragmatic and all-embracing:

For Biko and other proponents of Black Consciousness, blackness does not merely denote skin pigmentation but is ‘a reflection of a mental attitude’. It is as a consequence of this unambiguous and strategic conception of ‘blackness’ that Indian, coloured and black African poets wrote poems tackling various aspect of ‘black experience’ in apartheid South Africa.

Both literary experimentation and periodization are complex, contestable acts. All chronological groupings are potentially arbitrary. Yet a logical starting point for the parameters of postwar fiction is the cessation of major hostilities in 1945. Subsequently the nation punctuates a historical and ideological shift to the left with the Labour government's landslide election, defeating Winston Churchill. Much postwar fiction is imbued by politicization in response to the prevailing leftist ideological consciousness, which validated the consensus welfarism inspired by the Beveridge Report and the Labour victory.

As to when the postwar literary phase ends, generational and aesthetic changes occur in the mid to late 1970s, alongside seismic cultural and historical transformations. The 1973 oil crisis, the miners'strike, and the three-day week erode the long-standing Zeitgeist defined by a consensus familiar to babyboomers. Any residual ideological common ground collapses with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher, confirming another juncture in culture, ideology, and aesthetics. Following the lead of such historical landmarks, I focus on innovative novelists from 1945 to 1979, particularly on experimental texts that Bernard Bergonzi in The Situation of the Novel (1970) characterizes as “at a considerable distance from the well-made realistic novel as conventionally understood.”

Which elements of form and content justify characterizing particular acts of textualization or authorship as “experimental?” As Émile Zola explains in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (1893), naturalistic novels with their panoptic vision were originally considered experimental. For Zola such writing responds to the logic of matter and science (16).

In the final chapter of The English Novel (1930), Ford Madox Ford suggests that “when the dust of The Yellow Book period died away” after the trial of Oscar Wilde, there nevertheless remained in the public mind “some conception that novel writing was an art” and that “the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of psychological or scientific truth connected with human life and affairs could be very fittingly conveyed.” The three names Ford invokes for this moment are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Joseph Conrad – two Americans and a Pole, who at that moment were neighbours in Kent. For James and for Conrad (as for Ford), the conception of the novel as art comes from Flaubert: this means not only attention to verbal precision (le mot juste) and freedom regarding subject matter, but also “the doctrine of the novelist as Creator who should have a Creator's aloofness, rendering the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues and carrying the subject – the Affair – he has selected for rendering, remorselessly out to its logical conclusion” (123). Moreover, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, the Flaubertian commitment to style and form (and the logic of “the Affair”) also has an impact upon the professional milieu in which it operates: it is a pursuit of artistic autonomy that cannot overcome the forces of the marketplace, but that nevertheless establishes a separate realm of literary production and aesthetic value.

The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for the term “metafiction” – “Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions” – emphasizes the form's dependence on established artistic norms and, through later invocations of naturalism and postmodernism, its short pedigree. Indeed, the bestknown studies of metafiction in English have focussed on works published during the last century or so. As a consequence, metafiction is often construed as a relatively recent response to the shopworn conventions of realism. Patricia Waugh, for instance, has described metafiction as deliberately countering the expectations established by traditional fiction through its “opposition … to the language of the realistic novel.” However, the notion that metafictive play is the twentieth century's cheeky challenge to the hegemony of the realist novel is complicated by numerous examples of metafictional experimentation before the advent of “realist imperialism.” Waugh admits that postmodernism's “formal techniques seem often to have originated” from eighteenth-century predecessors (23–24), and Linda Hutcheon likewise acknowledges “the novel's early self-consciousness.” Nonetheless, both Waugh and Hutcheon concern themselves largely with twentieth-century works that respond to the nineteenth century's “reification of … a temporally limited concept of ‘realism’ into a definition of the entire genre” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 94).

Historical fiction, “heritage” fiction: a survey

A renewal of the genre of historical fiction has been a defining aspect of literary production since the appearance of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1969. Fowles's reimagining of nineteenth-century history and the Victorian novel heralded a range of new fictions covering multiple historical eras. This flourishing of the historical genre, besides complementing critical theory and self-conscious historiography, contributed to the reorientation of imperial history by postcolonial writers, particularly after the success of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981.

In light of a strong probability that the past attracts British novelists because it is grander than the post-imperial present, historical fiction appears to A. S. Byatt to be a way of turning away from the complexities of the contemporary world. This is a viewpoint that has been brought to bear upon Byatt's own writing and on that of others who use contemporary license to lay bare and exploit the past. Richard Bradford writes:

Anthony Powell's twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–1975) opens at an elite public school in 1921, and goes on to recount fifty years in the lives of the narrator Nick Jenkins's postwar generation. Having reached 1937 at the end of the fifth novel, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), the reader opens The Kindly Ones (1962), expecting to follow Nick, now in his thirties, into the Second World War. Yet the leisurely opening of this sixth installment is not what Powell's hitherto chronological narration has led us to anticipate. It is a beautiful but unsettled summer's morning in Nick's childhood: the housemaid is having a breakdown, the cook is in mortal fear of suffragettes burning the place down, and the Jenkinses have just learned that shiftlessUncleGiles is about to gatecrash their luncheon party. But when Uncle Giles eventually arrives he brings news that helps to explain why Powell has interrupted his sequential narrative with this extended flashback to events of decades earlier: “They've just assassinated an Austrian archduke down in Bosnia.” And then Powell recalls us to the late 1930s: whereas in 1914 “war had come for most people utterly without warning – like being pushed suddenly on a winter's day into a swirling whirlpool of ice-cold water by an acquaintance, unpredictable perhaps but not actively homicidal – war was now materializing in slow motion” (86–87). What motivates Powell's long flashback is an insight central to many retrospective treatments of the Second World War: that knowing this war means knowing it in relation to the last.

Nineteenth-century origins

Many enduring characteristics of South African literary and cultural criticism are evident in the very first articles, book and theatre reviews and lectures that appeared in the small-circulation newspapers and periodicals of the Cape. These early newspapers included John Fairbairn and Thomas Pringle's South African Commercial Advertiser (1824–69), William Bridekirk's South African Chronicle (1824–6), Frederick Brooks's South African Grins; or, The Quizzical Depot of General Humbug (1825–6), Joseph Suasso de Lima's De Verzamelaar/The Gleaner (1826–7), C. E. Boniface and C. N. Neethling's Zuid-Afrikaan (1830–71), A. J. Jardine's Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette (1830–5), and Robert Godlonton's Graham's Town Journal (1831–1919) (Huigen, ‘Neder-landstalige’, pp. 7–11; Lewin Robinson, None Daring). The periodicals of this period – Fairbairn and Pringle's South African Journal (1824), Abraham Faure's Het Nederduytsch Zuid-Afrikaansche Tydschrift (1824–43), Andrew Smith and James Adamson's South African Quarterly Journal (1830–7) and James L. Fitzpatrick's Cape of Good Hope Literary Magazine (1847–8) – were dominated by articles on the natural sciences, history and travel, and there were only occasional pieces of literary or cultural criticism, like Fairbairn's two-part essay ‘On the Writings of Wordsworth’ in the South African Journal (1 [1824], pp. 12–16, and 2 [1824], pp. 107–17), and the anonymous ‘On the Sources of Shakespeare's Plots’ in the Cape of Good Hope Literary Magazine (2, 10 [1848], pp. 571–92).

“That Fiction is an art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Music, and Poetry” was Walter Besant's argument before the Royal Institution on April 25, 1884. The argument was self-evident to anyone of a continental mentality but not “so generally perceived as to form, so to speak, part of the national mind” (6). England did not generally consider fiction an art. To the English a novelist “is a person who tells stories; just as they used to regard the actor as a man who tumbled on the stage to make the audience laugh, and a musician a man who fiddled to make the people dance” (9). Besant tries to elevate the novel by asserting its ancient primacy, its breadth (“its field is the whole of humanity”), its value (“it creates and develops that sympathy which is a kind of second sight”), and its subtlety in selection, arrangement, and suggestion (31–32). The claim to “subtlety” would have been surprising, even to an audience not inclined to laugh and dance. That fiction is an art distinguished by real aesthetic refinement needed serious proof, and Besant gave it a try – in “The Art of Fiction,” and as part of a culture of letters eager to give the English novel the distinction necessary to claim its place among the finest arts.

Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence are connoisseurs of consciousness who experiment with new fictional forms in order to redress older fiction's putative falsification of elusive inner realities. Woolf's “Modern Fiction” (1925) strikes a characteristically modernist note of rebellion in the name of inner freedom: “if a writer … could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style.” Woolf's choice of pronoun masks and dramatizes her struggle to find new ways to express not only life in its immediacy but female experiences of modernity. In 1923 she credits Richardson with inventing a “woman's sentence”: “It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes.” Richardson too sees her writing as an attempt “to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.” Although Lawrence has been characterized as the exemplary patriarch targeted by Woolf, Richardson, and feminism generally, Lawrence believes he is enlisting formal innovations to liberate the female voice from long-standing misrepresentation, and to subvert received notions of masculinity and normative sexuality. All three writers are sexual dissidents. Their shared effort to represent more faithfully the fullness of existence – being rather than “mere” doing – underscores the fact that what we call modernism is for many of its practitioners a newly heightened realism.