The Politics of Home
The Politics of Home draws attention to the multiple relocations that take place in literatures in English in the twentieth century by examining the changing representation of 'home' in such narratives. Through an exploration of imperial fiction, contemporary literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial narratives on belonging, Rosemary Marangoly George argues that complex literary allegiances are visible in textual reformulations of 'home' and that George's concept of 'global English' challenges the very logic of literary landscapes organised in accordance with national boundaries. Reading Englishwomen's narration of their success in the empire against Conrad's account of colonial masculine failure, Frederic Jameson alongside R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai and other contemporary Indian writers with the British Romantic poets in mind, Edward Said next to M. G. Vassanji and Jamacia Kincaid, and Conrad through Naipual and Ishiguro, The Politics of Home explores the privilege and pain underlying 'feeling at home' in literature.
- Illuminating new ideas about the place of literature in a world of 'global English'
- Reads 'first-world' and 'third-world' writers alongside each other, drawing new connections between them
- New readings of the work of a wide range of modern writers
Reviews & endorsements
'Throughout the book, George examines an impressive array of authors, texts, discourses, cultural practices, material institutions, and ideologies in which both formulations come into play. In its sustained intertextuality and its ability to take propositions and turn them around in order to generate a productive unease, The Politics of Home is an intellectually stimulating and absorbing reconfiguration of postcolonial cultural studies.' Aparajita Sagar, Diaspora
Product details
August 1996Hardback
9780521453349
275 pages
236 × 158 × 20 mm
0.511kg
Unavailable - out of print April 2010
Table of Contents
- Prologue: All fiction is homesickness …
- 1. Home-countries: narratives across disciplines
- 2. The authorative Englishwoman: setting up home and self in the colonies
- 3. The great English tradition: Joseph Conrad writes home
- 4. Nostalgic theorizing: at home in 'Third World' fictions
- 5. Elite plotting, domestic postcoloniality
- 6. Travelling light: home and the immigrant genre
- Epilogue: all homesickness is fiction.