Books in the Contemporary World Writers series

In this comprehensive critical study of Kureishi's work Bart Moore-Gilbert provides a detailed account of his work to date. The author locates Kureishi's work securely in its historical, social, cultural and critical contexts, as well as providing detailed readings of all the major works.

This study of the work of Alice Munro explores the appeal of her fictions of small-town Canada with their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossip and scandal.

This study - the first of its kind - situates Rohinton Mistry's writing in its cultural and historical context. It explores key features, such as the legacy of Zoroastrianism, Parsi anglophilia, recent Indian history, and the Persian and European narrative traditions on which Mistry draws to produce his distinctive postcolonial fictions.

This book examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and has recently published what she has announced will be her final novel. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

Amitav Ghosh is an authoritative critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. It is the first full-length study of Amitav Ghosh's work to be available outside India. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictional and non-fictional writings to date, this book takes a thematic approach which enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies making this book both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the 'postcolonial', in particular, its relation to postmodernism. Aimed at students and the general reader, this book is an ideal introduction to one of contemporary literature's most fascinating writers.

An introduction to Toni Morrison's fiction, this text focuses on its engagement with African-American history and the way the traumas of the collective past shape Morrison's work. It approaches Morrison's fiction as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history.

Don Randall's comprehensive study situates acclaimed author David Malouf within the field of contemporary international and psotcolonial writing, but without losing sight of the author's affiliation with Australian contexts. The book presents an original reading of Malouf, but also engages with the full body of preceding Malouf criticism.

In this comprehensive and lucid critical study, Andrew Teverson examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure.

This book provided the first comprehensive account of the Booker Prize-winning poet and novellist, Michael Ondaatje. It also offers a guide to key issues in postcolonial writing and theory.

This book focuses on representations of slavery in the works of contemporary British authors Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar, specifically exploring how racial anxieties in twenty-first century Britain may be seen as legacies of this largely ignored, but deeply significant, past.

R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of "e;authentic"e; Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan's writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan's imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan's career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan's fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist to both ethnic and feminist discourses.

A major new study of Africa's most important writer, offering a comprehensive reassessment of Achebe's work as a novelist, broadcaster and political thinker -- .

John Thieme provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts - Caribbean, European and other - which have shaped him as a writer.

In this critical study of Les Murray's work Steven Matthews provides a complete picture of his career to date, from its early parables of national emergence to the working man's epic encounter with the major events of the 20th century, "Fredy Neptune".

This is a revised and expanded edition of Woodcock's accessible study, now including detailed readings of Carey's latest novels, 'Jack Maggs' and 'True History of the Kelly Gang'.