1st Edition

Postcolonial Nostalgias Writing, Representation and Memory

By Dennis Walder Copyright 2011
214 Pages
by Routledge

214 Pages
by Routledge

214 Pages
by Routledge

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland,... Read more

Preface and Acknowledgments 1: Introductory: The Persistence of Nostalgia 2: ‘How is it going Mr Naipaul?’: Remembering Postcolonial Identites 3: ‘The Broken String’: Remembering the Homeland 4: ‘Alone in a Landscape’: Remembering Doris Lessing’s Africa 5: Recalling the Hidden Ends of Empire: W.G. Sebald 6: Remembering ‘bitter histories’: From Achebe to Adichie 7: Nostalgia for the Present: J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun Endnote Notes Bibliography Index

Biography

Dennis Walder is Professor of Literature at the Open University. His publications include Dickens and Religion, Athol Fugard (whose work he has also edited), Post-Colonial Literatures in English, and the bestselling reader Literature in the Modern World.

"Walder's book is a triumph of brilliant exposition because it simplifies nothing. Readers are led sensibly, stylishly, and authoritatively through the thickets of relevant postcolonial and psychological theory, relevant twentieth-and twenty-first-century colonial history, and the focal narratives themselves." - R. Victoria Arana, College Litearture