Writing to Johannes Stinstra in 1753, Samuel Richardson revealed his childhood fascination for learning the secrets of the heart. He began his writing career as a precocious busybody whose curiosity thrived in his crowded urban world. Neighbors, particularly young women, revealed small sins and desires to serious young Samuel. One victim under his surveillance took offense. Richardson was “not Eleven Years old when [he] wrote, spontaneously, to a Widow of near Fifty … who was … continually fomenting Quarrels & Disturbances, by Backbiting & Scandal.” Adopting “the Stile and Address of a Person in Years,” Richardson “expostulated with her. But my Handwriting was known.” The boy was discovered and “chid” for his freedoms, but he continued to be an “early Favourite with all the young Women of Taste & Reading in the Neighbourhood,” reading to them while they sewed. When he was “not more than Thirteen,” he served as “Secretary” to several young women who needed help in writing their love letters. We have then a “bashful” and grave adolescent writer in the making, given to impersonations, happy to act as amanuensis to encourage or chide, “at the very time that the Heart … was open before me, overflowing,” and the lover was “dreading to be taken at her Word.”

Just as happy to expostulate with a backbiting zealot, Richardson finds power in assuming a character while exposing the heart. In both examples the power of the impersonated style, that of the elderly scold or the nervous lover disguising her feelings, is profound.

Novelists grapple throughout the twentieth century with concerns related to identity and belonging. After the “Windrush generation” and the winding down of the British Empire, the headline treatments of identity had chiefly to dowith multiculturalism in an era of postcolonialism. This chapter addresses a different matter: the tension between local allegiances and broader allegiances. How is regional belonging in the twentieth century understood, and how does it fit with national affiliation? How have novelists continued the tradition of regional fiction, and how has “English” identity in relation to place been complicated by the intersecting concerns of the “four nations,” especially where Irish, Welsh, and Scottish nationalisms have greater popular impetus than any pursuit of Englishness?

Regional fiction has conventionally been associated with rural experience or with experience focussed on provincial towns in rural settings. (There is an additional complication here, in that regionalism and provincialism are overlapping terms.) In the context of the twentieth-century English novel, regionalism has its heyday in the 1930s, and is usually deemed to have tailed off after the Second World War. A commonsense explanation for the apparent decline of the regional novel in Englandmight be that the idea of regionalisminevitably changes with the improvement of modes and routes of travel, which have meant that regions are less self-contained than they were.

Although twentieth-century literary drama in English and Afrikaans appeared in separate milieus in print, on stage or in informal circulation, theatrical practice mixed indigenous forms like izibongo (praises) and ingoma (music) with modern inventions like vaudeville, minstrelsy and the jazz musical. This diversity reflected a syncretic history and hinted at an integrated future, despite the entrenchment of segregation. Whilst segregationists would have denied these facts, supporters of an integral South Africa found in theatre a place and occasion for staging unity in diversity and an alternative public sphere in a hostile state. Theatrical forms identified with South Africa in the last half-century have been thoroughly hybridised, whether in variations of international forms like satirical skits or intimate confessionals or in distinctly local transformations:

• the musical fuses ingoma ebusuku (literally: ‘music by night’; analytically: performance by professionals or aspirants in urban settings for cash) and the African American jazz revue to produce multilingual drama with songs, dance and dialogue.

• the testimonial play or theatre of witness, protest or resistance, testifies to individual and collective struggle, blending dialogue, narrative, and polemical statements; its trajectory includes Herbert Dhlomo's The Pass (1942), Athol Fugard's No-Good Friday (1958), as well as Survival (1976) and other collectively created plays, culminating in Born in the RSA (1986). The best bear powerful witness, but the relative authority and authorship of witness and interpreter remain controversial. (For these and other South African theatrical genres, see Kruger, Drama of South Africa, pp. 1–34, 86–99, 154–209)

The above exchange, which constitutes one of several frontispieces that frame G. V. Desani’s maverick and freewheeling novel of 1949, offers a provocative opening for this essay. Writing two years after the independence of India, Desani makes his ‘author’ and his initially blustering stance define the very essence of postcolonial necessity. Now is the time of immense social and cultural change, a moment pregnant with opportunity, which demands transformation of the mere fact of the novel into something far more meaningful: the ‘gesture’. And yet this grandiloquence is rapidly brought down to earth by the brute realities of the market, which relentlessly declares its own chain of demand and supply. The author’s quick turnaround, while ridiculous, is touchingly redeemed by the pragmatism that propels it. Moreover, it is an ‘Indian middle-man’ who, in the name of the ordinary ‘rank and file’, imposes on the author these mundane yet unavoidable pressures.

“In those times, as now”: with this characteristic phrase George Eliot writes of past and present and of the absence of those spiritual symbols thatwould confirm belief and lead characters toward the promised land – somewhere. Maggie Tulliver's journey in The Mill on the Floss toward the metaphorical “Promised Land” is, the narrator notes, “thirsty, trackless, uncertain” (251). The endings of all of George Eliot's novels leave one, if not dissatisfied, then certain that promised lands are at most imagined ideas about moral sympathy and, sometimes, belief; they are not Dickensian communities grouped around the hearth. Dickens's endings have no part of George Eliot's commitment to realism.

Born in 1819 into a world of vast change – “Since yesterday, a century has passed away,” we hear in Middlemarch (1872) (378) – George Eliot more than all Victorian novelists encompasses the movements of mind that characterize Queen Victoria's England. Beginning her life as an intensely Evangelical Christian, she became the translator of David Friedrich Strauss's Leben Jesu (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854), an editor at the radical Westminster Review, and “the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England … the first legitimate fruit of our modern atheistic pietism,” “the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief.” George Eliot brings to the writing of fiction an unparalleled understanding of the philosophical and epistemological issues and challenges of modernity, and a sense of the novel as anything but entertainment.

When considering the fate of satire in the twentieth century, it is easy to find ourselves retailing dubious clichés of literary periodization. We are tempted to say that in the passage from Victorian to modernist fiction there comes a fundamental shift in the hierarchy of genres. Satire, which played a crucial role in the emergence of the English novel in the 1700s, only to be largely abandoned by the mid-nineteenth century, suddenly reappears at the fin de siècle and within a few decades reclaims its original prominence and stature. Drawing on Northrop Frye's scheme of generic mythos and archetypes, which associates satire with winter, we could then describe the genre's resurgence in the modernist period as part of a major change in the literary climate, the warm sentiment of Victorian fiction giving way to modernism's famed coldness, impersonality, and detachment.

Though reductive and misleading (and not just with regard to the Victorians), this narrative of satire's near-fatal collapse and dramatic recovery is not altogether false. But we should recall that even in its abstract lineaments Frye's scheme allows no pure instances; in each of its six “phases,” satire is blended with elements either of tragedy or of comedy. We are dealing with matters of degree rather than kind, and indeed with modalities of affect rather than with genre in the strictly formal sense. What happened toward the turn of the last century is not that a certain kind of text, the satiric form of the novel, having been effectively banished in the mid-nineteenth century, suddenly enjoys a revival.

Introduction

This chapter traces the intersection between the spread of English in postcolonial communities and its employment as a vehicle of postcolonial literature. Rather than listing developments in individual countries, or forms of English that have arisen there, the chapter looks at metadiscourse, at the methodological issues and ideological undercurrents that have contributed to shape the ways in which we describe such language phenomena and literary products. In spite of the fundamental differences in outlook, there are many similarities between the study of ‘English languages’ and that of ‘English literatures’, and there has been quite an amount of cross-fertilization, because on the one hand the symbolic value of language has been a key aspect in the development of postcolonial literatures, and on the other hand this development has been conducive to the emerging of new identities conveyed by language variation.

For these reasons, the second part of the chapter is devoted to literary statements on English, intended both as metacomments on the writers’ lives and works, and as representations of language use within their works. The first part outlines some main concepts and models within linguistic studies on postcolonial English, and some points of contact with literary theory, starting from issues related to terminology, which are far from being irrelevant or neutral.

The meaning of “autonomy”

“Autonomy” is a powerfully resonant concept in a variety of contexts. In aesthetic theory it refers to a quality specific to art: its capacity to create meanings through its formal properties, and to generate ways of encountering the world that are distinct from other forms of social experience. Artistic autonomy implies that the creation and the judgment of artistic texts require a sensibility and an imagination separate from other sorts of knowledge or practice. In modernism, and in critical responses to modernism, to see artistic experience as separate from, and potentially superior to, other ways of experiencing the world involves focussing on the material and formal properties of the art object. It is the formal autonomy of the artwork that is emphasized for example in A.C. Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909) and Clive Bell's Art (1914). Critical discussion of modernist literary texts has been powerfully shaped by this idea of aesthetic autonomy, which continues to be important for many critics of modernism.

However, fascination with “autonomy” as the defining nature of artistic objects and aesthetic experience has been contested by critics who see it as denying to art its relation to historical and social experience. Perhaps the most polemical criticism is Peter Bürger's theoretical and critical study, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). Bürger argues that modern understanding of artistic “autonomy” is historically limited and historically limiting.

Introduction

A reader turning to this chapter might ask what part film plays in a history of postcolonial literature, and so it is perhaps necessary to begin by explaining that the focus here is not on postcolonial film per se, but on the relationship between film and writing in postcolonial contexts. A topic as expansive as this makes it impossible to adequately historicize each context; however, the term ‘postcolonial film’, in contrast to the more widely used ‘world cinema’, does provide a sense of historical and thematic scope in that it refers to a form of filmmaking that has been impacted by, or that responds to, colonialism and imperialism. Building on Ato Quayson’s definition of the postcolonial in the introduction to these volumes, this chapter works with the claim that ‘If the wide variety of writing that critics and readers group under the label “postcolonial” has anything in common, it is an awkward reliance on imperial remainders.’ Although film has been introduced in very different ways in different colonial and postcolonial contexts, similarities in motivations and effects may be found. In West Africa in the early 1900s, the French used film as a form of cultural colonization, as a tool within their general policy of assimilation of local people to French ways of life; in India the British exploited the economic potential of film, attempting to inculcate British taste so as to bring large financial returns to the empire; in Mexico, film arrived almost a century after political independence from Spain, when the country was under the dictatorial control of Porfirio Díaz, who did not hesitate to exploit the medium to build his own reputation and enforce his policies and ideologies.

In eighteenth-century Britain many of the writings we now call novels functioned as a national form on a number of levels. As a technology of national consciousness along lines Benedict Anderson has described, eighteenth-century novels helped British readers imagine the simultaneous, intertwined existence of fellow Britons. While daily newspapers offered the most widespread and immediate version of printed matter consumed concurrently across vast regions, the circulation of novels throughout the nation and their subsequent reviews, imitations, and sequels, sometimes within the pages of periodical publications, would also underwrite a consciousness of shared cultural touch-points across a geographically diverse English reading population within a roughly contemporaneous time frame. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) illuminates this phenomenon in particularly high relief, and contemporary criticism of that bestselling book, whether affirmative or oppositional, frequently spoke of its impact on the nation. Within novels themselves writers developed narrative strategies for representing the consciousness of simultaneity that is crucial for imagining the nation – so much so that writers could poke fun at the convention. A discomfited Tristram returns “to my mother” several chapters after leaving her eaves-dropping on his father and uncle through a chink in the door. The intrusive narrator of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, having broken off the narration of the near-rape of Fanny to relate the dialogue between a Poet and Player, doubles back to “poor Fanny, whom we left in so deplorable a Condition.”

This chapter furnishes a history of key journals and institutions that have shaped the contours of the field of postcolonial studies. Although controversy and debate characterize discussion on the definition, scope and duration of the ‘postcolonial’, the origins of the field are usually located without much dispute around the late 1970s. Customary accounts of the beginnings of postcolonial studies index the cultural, postmodern, literary and textual turn in a line of enquiry which began and developed much earlier in history, political science, and anthropology. The emergence of the ersatz ‘Third World’ in the wake of the 1955 Bandung conference constitutes some of the prehistory of the field, although admittedly under the nametag of ‘Third World’ rather than ‘postcolonial’, and largely within disciplines other than literary studies. Beginnings are notoriously provisional, but even so, the field of what Aijaz Ahmad calls ‘literary postcoloniality’ is not without its own prehistory, one that goes by the name of Commonwealth literary studies (CLS), and has been poorly integrated into usual accounts of the rise of postcolonial studies. Enmeshment in the scope, definition and task of postcolonial studies and contemporary interest in the ‘beyond’ of postcolonial studies – often conceived in terms of the future or as transcending historical colonialism altogether – sometimes displaces a more thorough understanding of its complex origins, its multiple strands and regional dimensions. In each of these areas, key journals and institutions have been instrumental in the development of a rich set of resources for a study of the literature, culture and theoretical insights associated with the experience of colonialism and its aftermath. It is the aim of this chapter to tell that story.

A confessional mode dominated white South African autobiography in English in the 1990s; this followed the emphasis on bearing witness in black writing of the previous two decades. More recently, confession has entered black writing too. In Afrikaans writing, the modes of apologia (a defence of individual beliefs and actions) and auto-ethnography (a form of life-writing that relates the personal to the broader cultural and sociopolitical context) are still generally favoured. Since 1994, writing in English by black and white has presented a continuing desire to speak truthfully about the impact of power relations on selfhood (as confession met witness-bearing), but self-reflection has become less anguished in the context of a vision of nation building for which the new constitution and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) were the public faces. Although nearly all the political parties and many communities in South Africa have subsequently withheld complete support from the TRC's procedures (Johnson, SA's Brave New World, pp. 272–93) and findings, hopeful interactions between a newly inclusive vision and autobiography are evident and individual stories continue to reflect and perhaps shape the macrohistory.

Before discussing particular post-1994 autobiographies, this chapter will indicate some of the earlier, but comparably symbiotic, relationships between life-writing and the elements of the national imaginary that can be traced across South African history. Then it will take up the suggestion that in the past fifteen years of potentially inclusive democracy there is emerging a more open, less guilt-ridden mode of confessional writing, in which, particularly in the case of black writers, the representation of selfhood raises fresh questions about community.

In Jane Austen's Emma (1816), near the beginning of the famous outing to Box Hill, we are told that:

Much, though not all, of the cognitive functioning described in this passage is being shared between characters. These are social minds in action because they are, in general, public, embodied, and so available to each other. The italicized phrases show that thought can be shared between groups of individuals. Everyone feels the need to engage together in admiration-behavior. The feelings of languor and want of spirits, and the resulting want of union, are jointly experienced.

Pamela (1740) was not the first novel to start a craze – Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) inspired sequels, pamphlets, and even a restaurant – and nor was it the first novel to be denounced; but the quality and intensity of attention it received resonated far beyond that particular book and the characters and fashions described therein. Pamela, and the controversy it sparked, transformed a loose, inchoate form into the modern novel. Pamela shifted attention away from events and questions of truthfulness onto character and questions of believability. Early novels, like Oroonoko and Moll Flanders, made truth claims, stressing that the events they described really happened. Pamela purported to be a true story as well, but because the stakes were so high – social advancement through the power of narrative – Pamela's believability, rather than Pamela's fictiveness, took center stage: responses such as Henry Fielding's Shamela (1741) argued that Pamela was a hypocrite; he asserted that her virtue was fictional, not her existence. Pamela's epistolary format, its insistent location in the present tense, instantly raised questions of character, of self-presentation, and of the ability ever really to gain access to the workings of another person's mind, in life or fiction. Pamela did not just spark a craze: it redefined the way both writers and readers approached the novel. Carolyn Steadman argues that Pamela “is all selfhood, all inside, and [her] depth as a point of reference for female interiority has been immense.” But it was not only women who viewed both Pamela and Pamela as touchstones.

After chapters of broad social comedy centering on Lady Clonbrony's extravagant bid for acceptance by London high society, Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812) takes a remarkable turn. Lord Colambre, Lady Clonbrony's son, both a native of Ireland and a stranger to it (hence the novel's title), arrives in Dublin, and immediately each detail of the setting is etched with representative significance as Lord Colambre begins to test his mother's contempt for the country that supplies the family's precarious means of support. Within pages the novel offers a conspectus of the transformations the Irish capital has undergone since the Act of Union – always the decisive historical marker in Edgeworth's fiction. The nobility had retreated to their country houses or gone abroad, and “commerce rose into the vacated seats of rank; wealth rose into the place of birth.” Within a few years, however, the “want of manners [and] knowledge, in the nouveaux riches” leads to ridicule and bankruptcy (83–84). Worst of all, the Irish peasantry become outrageously exploited by agents of the absentee landlords; and the absentees in turn become victims of their own efforts to match the expenditure and the snobbery of the English. For the Irish the result is an international network of well-nigh insoluble debts. The debts are exacerbated by the geographical and historical distance between England and Ireland.

Some important English novels have been popular; some have not; but our volume is not a history of bestsellers. Granted, the novel is not an entirely autonomous literary form, developing in isolation from the influence of market forces. Nor does it develop in isolation from politics, national or international. Far from it: no one could seriously make such an argument. And yet if the novel sees at all – if it offers unique insights – it does so through the ceaseless making, breaking, and remaking of literary forms. Every decision that a novelist makes is formally mediated, and retracing those decisions provides access to the history of the novel. By attending to this history of formal innovations one begins to understand the range and depth of which the English novel has been capable. We hope, even though the Cambridge History concludes by affirming the enduring power of romance, that our way of turning the novel's progress into history is less quixotic than the quest of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

The challenging side of the genre never fades from view: it does, after all, create something new under the sun. To be sure, the aesthetic and the political avant-garde do not necessarily coincide. And, in any case, as Mikhail Bakhtin points out, any one asserted perspective in the novel is usually rendered relative to others with which it is in conflict.

In 1975 the Afrikaans Language Monument was completed. It stands on the southern slopes of Paarl Mountain, overlooking the site where the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (GRA) (Association of True Afrikaners) first came together a century before to help standardise Afrikaans and to promote Afrikaans literature. It is an abstract-style monument with sharp lines designed by the architect Jan van Wijk: to the left the colonnade symbolises the languages and cultures of western Europe; encircling the front and right the podium represents Africa; and the low wall between the African and European elements symbolises the Malayan language and culture. The main column rises from the confluence of these structures and represents Afrikaans: distinct yet rooted in these diverse linguistic and cultural traditions. On its right, a column symbolising the Republic of South Africa stands free, yet remains part of the structure. As Van Wyk Louw's inscription reads:

This chapter will emphasize the relation between evangelization and culture by arguing that official missionary discourse was one of necessary ambiguity, and that the missionary intervention in society and culture legitimized a counter discourse in postcolonial writing.

Coming in waves

The spread of Christianity on the African continent did not occur exclusively with European expansion outside the Western hemisphere from the fifteenth century onwards. Rather it came in several waves. Early Christianity in North Africa during the first and second centuries gave birth to a dynamic and vibrant Christian church, and produced eminent Fathers of the Church such as Saint Augustine, Bishop Cyprian and the theologian and writer Tertullian. The Islamic conquest of Africa soon overshadowed and almost completely erased Christianity in the region, and yet the church survived in different Coptic denominations in Egypt and Ethiopia.

A second wave of new evangelization took place during the fifteenth century, concomitant with the great discoveries spearheaded by European expansion outside the West. Portugal’s political power was coupled with the exertions of Portuguese explorers to conquer new territories with the seal and the approval of the Holy See, the highest Christian authority. Through papal bulls (Dum Diversas (January 1452) and Romanus Pontifex (January 1455) by Nicolas V, Inter Cetera (March 1456) by Callixte III, Aeterni Regis Clementia (June 1481) by Sixte IV, Dum Fide Constantium (1514) and Dumdum Pro Parte (1516) by Leon X), the popes granted to the kings of Portugal the full right to conquer territories, and at the same time to bring the Christian faith into these newly conquered spaces.

Introduction

Since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) South Asian postcolonial literature in English has not merely become a major publishing success, but it has also acquired the hallmark of academic respectability owing to its exuberant intertextual playfulness, self-reflexive toying with the narrator–reader relation, its sheer inventiveness and expansive magic realist fabulation. Two labels helped to place Rushdie and his followers like Shashi Tharoor, Sunetra Gupta or Arundhati Roy among the literary elite: the affinity to the already canonized magic realism of South American provenance (Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes) and the postmodernist narrative techniques employed by Rushdie and others (selfreflexivity, parody, extensive use of analepsis, metalepsis and paralipsis, montage, subversion of ontological distinctions, metafiction). In fact, in hindsight, Rushdie’s (and Tharoor’s) works can now, more specifically, be categorized as historiographical metafictions, a prominent subcategory of postmodernist writing.