By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial globalisation on postcolonial rural spaces.

Autorentext

Lucienne Loh is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Brunel University and Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published a number of articles on postcolonial literature and theory as well as on contemporary British literature. She helped to establish the Postcolonial Studies Association in 2008 and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction Foreign Fields that will be Forever England PART I: LEGACIES OF EMPIRE IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE 1. The Politics of Postimperial Melancholia and Rural Heritage in the 1980s: W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn 2. Rural Routes of Empire, Colonial Nostalgia and the Thatcher Years: V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival 3. Contemporary Black Britain and the English Countryside: David Dabydeen's Disappearance and Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore PART II: LEGACIES OF EMPIRE IN THE POSTCOLONIAL RURAL 4. Towards a Provincial Cosmopolitanism: Amitava Kumar's Bombay London New York 5. A Distinctly Uncosmopolitan Present: The Postcolonial Rural in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps 6. Historicising Neocolonial Globalisation and Political Revolution: Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place Epilogue Local Futures, Global Fissures Bibliography Index