As England withdrew from its empire after World War II, how did writers living outside the United Kingdom respond to the history of colonialism and the aesthetics of modernism within a global context? In fourteen original essays, a distinguished group of scholars considers these questions in relation to novelists, playwrights, and poets living in English-speaking countries around the world.

• Notes on Contributors


• Introduction Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses


• Part I: Africa


• Chapter 1: Modernism in Chinua Achebe's African Tetralogy Brian May


• Chapter 2: Reading Ngugi Reading Conrad: Modernism, Postcolonialism and the Language Question


• Mark Wollaeger


• Chapter 3: Kafka and Coetzee Simon During


• Chapter 4: Locating Gordimer: Modernism, Postcolonialism, Realism Rita Barnard


• Part II: Asia


• Chapter 5: Rushdie and the Art of Modernism Richard Begam


• Chapter 6: Make It New: Trauma and the Postcolonial Modern in The God of Small Things


• Deepika Bahri


• Part III: The Caribbean


• Chapter 7: (The knocking) has never stopped: Jean Rhys's (Post)colonial Modernism Andrzej Gasiorek


• Chapter 8: Walcott, Woolf and Joyce: the Risks of Postcolonial Modernism Genevieve Abravanel


• Chapter 9: Worlds Lost and Founded: V. S. Naipaul as Belated Modernist Michael Valdez Moses


• Part IV: Ireland


• Chapter 10: Samuel Beckett and the Colonial Gag Nico Israel


• Chapter 11: Slow Erosions: Seamus Heaney and the Aftermath of Modernism Nicholas Allen


• Part V: Australia/New Zealand


• Chapter 12: Interior History, Tempered Selves: David Malouf, Modernism and Imaginative Possession


• Brigid Rooney


• Chapter 13: Modernism and Maoritagna: Re-Reading the Cultural Politics of Modernist Appropriation in the bone people


• Philip Steer


• Part VI: Canada


• Chapter 14: Michael Ondaatje Tricks the Eye Alice Brittan

Richard Begam is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (1996).
Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (Oxford UP, 1995).