Volume 13: 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford English Literary History) - Softcover

Review from previous edition Although several good anthologies and readers exist in the field, this is the first comprehensive literary history of Black and Asian literature after World War II. As such, King's book - judicious, thorough, steeped in its sources - is a major critical contribution to both "postcolonial" and "English" literary history, sure to be consulted and read by scholars and students hoping to understand the extraordinary diversification of English writing in the second half of the twentieth century. (Virginia Quarterly Review)

his book records the international changes that defined English literature after 1948 and, by doing so, it becomes a useful contribution to post-colonial studies. (Dipli Saikia, THES,)

One of the books strengths lies in its demarcation of literary influences. We see how Wilson Harris affected a later generation, including Ben Okri and Fred d'Aguiar; the enormous influence of Wole Soyinka on many writers. More important, King looks at the precariousness of the new literature, and the network that sprung up to support it. (Dipli Saikia, THES,)

King is admirably ready to discriminate between writing with stylistic integrity and shallow work that owes its success more to liberal guilt than literary merit. (Jeremy Noel-Tod, Saturday Telegraph)

This survey is unprecedented in its seriousness and detail. King traces historical influences, along with the biography of subsequent writers, putting them in the context of both their ethnic background and their British environment. He reads genres with an unusual degree of attention. He balances shifts in consciousness against changes in political and social awareness. (Mike Phillips, The Guardian Review)

Bruce King brings to the scene the virtues of traditional lit-crit. along with a tough-minded determination to map the features of the new writing. He begins with a refreshingly bullish justification of his title and subject. (Mike Phillips, The Guardian Review)

In the future, what will 'English Literary History' mean? A literary history of England, or one with much looser boundaries, defined only by a communality of language, not by location or history? In this, the last volume in the Oxford English Literary History, Bruce King discusses the literature written by those who have chosen to make England their home since 1948. With decolonization following World War II, and the growth of large immigrant communities in England, came a wave of colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant writers whose entry onto the British cultural landscape forces us to consider what it is to be British, English, or national now that England is multiracial and part of a global economy.

King addresses these new trends in English literature and the questions they raise in the first wide-ranging and comprehensive account of immigrant literature set in a social context. Ranging through Black and Asian British prose, poetry, and drama, and writers including V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith, King reveals the development of the literature from writing about immigration to becoming English. Now that the literature of England includes Sri Lankans, Egyptians, and British Nigerians, does this mean that we can no longer talk of the English nation as a cultural unit? King concludes persuasively that it does not. We have not seem the demise of national cultures; rather, a new, accomplished, and socially significant body of writing in England is influenced by the interaction between foreign cultures and British traditions. This bold and challenging account of British culture will shape debate for future generations.