This essay documents Joy Williams's development as a writer through the first decades of her career, identifying the prominence of priest or preacher figures in her writing. Her work, it argues, stages the crisis of language and authority brought about in American life by the decline of mainline Protestant churches and of institutional Christianity as such in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Williams was one of the most admired and imitated American writers of that period. Reading her work, we see how religious change helped motivate some of the signature stylistic characteristics of late twentieth-century American fiction. Williams's work parodies the proliferating styles of admonitory, affirmative, or consolatory speech which fill the space opened by the retreat of doctrinal Christianity and asks how speech and writing respond to death and suffering in periods of spiritual or personal transition or uncertainty. Read in this way, Williams's writing appears as more than an exemplum of craft, and as significant in the literary history of American late modernity.

This chapter provides an account first of the nature of English literary study in the colonial Caribbean, and then of Caribbean attempts to decolonize the practice in the later twentieth century. It analyzes the evolving ways scholars and teachers have understood the “coloniality” of the practices they inherited, and the different means by which they have attempted to change them. It also analyzes representations of literary study in works of Caribbean literature. It schematizes the decolonization of English literary study into three broad movements. First, it describes attempts to incorporate more material by Caribbean writers on literary curricula after independence. Second, focusing on Sylvia Wynter’s early essays, it describes the incorporation of anticolonial forms of critique in critical method. Finally, it shows how Caribbean scholars expanded the purview of literary studies, incorporating analysis of popular forms including calypso and dancehall. Overall, the chapter asks how scholars in the anglophone Caribbean have understood the task of decolonizing the English literary curriculum and what lessons this might hold for those working both within and outside the Caribbean today.

ABSTRACT:Penelope Fitzgerald wanted her readers to attend to the 'spiritual' meaning of her work, but what did that mean? This essay explores Fitzgerald's relationship with Edward Burne-Jones - the subject of her first book - arguing that her ideas about the 'spiritual' purpose of art derive in large part from the 'Victorian Idealism' of Burne-Jones and his circle. Burne-Jones, I argue, was a central figure in Fitzgerald's artistic development. Her biography, Edward Burne-Jones, can be read as a partial ars poetica, helping us understand the technique and ambition of her own later work.

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

Travel writing in English has historically been seen as a genre in which British travellers visit and write about colonized places. This chapter, by contrast, reads a number of works in which Caribbean travellers describe their experiences in Africa. It examines Lamming’s Pleasures of Exile, V.S. Naipaul’s writings on Zaire and the Ivory Coast, Shiva Naipaul’s North of South, and Maryse Condé’s La Vie sans fards in detail. In these works, the writers revisit and revise the British tradition. Travel writing was a genre through which Caribbean writers thought through and articulated the position of the Caribbean within the new postcolonial world.

This chapter is about historical writing in the West Indies, from the 1960s onwards. Historical writing about the colonial past was a key place in which Caribbean writers in this era analysed the social and cultural impact of that history and looked forward to a decolonized future. Naipaul’s Loss of El Dorado is a fascinating but neglected text in this conversation, and is a key text in the development of his historical and social thought. This chapter positions Naipaul’s work within a history of West Indian historical writing, and historiographical debate, looking in detail at the work of C.L.R. James, Elsa Goveia, Eric Williams, Derek Walcott, and David Scott.

(2020). Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. Caribbean Quarterly: Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 134-136.

This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took place. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was central to this debate. It responds to a history of West Indian novels and novel theory, and became an influential text in novels, criticism, and social theory in the region. Work by George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Sylvia Wynter is discussed in detail. By tracing the changing reception of A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean through the 1960s, we can also trace changing ideas and priorities in Caribbean social thought.

The claim that African cultural forms survived in Caribbean societies was interrogated when Caribbean writers traveled to West Africa. A common trope, "realistic shock," is found in many travelogues and memoirs that describe this journey. In this trope, an encounter with the "real" Africa dispels earlier "romantic" notions of the continent as source-culture or homeland for Caribbean people. During the years of decolonization and independence, George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul used this trope to express skepticism toward claims for African-Caribbean connection. But Maryse Conde used the trope differently, to articulate a new understanding of the relationship between the Caribbean and Africa.

Review by Andrew Hodgson (University of Birmingham) of Michael D. Hurley and Marcus Waithe (eds.), Thinking through Style : Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 359. £60. ISBN 9780198737827.

This article reads Sara Suleri's memoirs Meatless Days (first published in 1989) and Boys Will Be Boys (2003) in dialogue with The Rhetoric of English India (1992), her influential work of postcolonial theory. It argues that Suleri's life writing and scholarship respond to the same fundamental questions about writing and description, and foreground visual metaphors to show how the memoirist distorts or imaginatively invents her absent subjects as a critic distorts or invents the text they read. Suleri understands criticism, like memoir, to be an act of creative, and distorting, remembrance. Reading Suleri's work in this way prompts us to reread the postcolonial theory of the 1980s and 1990s as a body of literature, a register of and a meditation on a history of 20th-century migration and cultural encounter.

In December 2015 the BBC announced a “major new ten-part series” telling the story of human creativity “from the dawn of human history to the present day”. Remaking a praised but unfashionable pred...

The Formalist Genesis of “Postcolonial” Reading: Brathwaite, Bhabha, and A House for Mr Biswas William Ghosh The novel was an imported form. For the metropolitan writer it was only one aspect of self-knowledge. About it was a mass of other learning, other imaginative forms, other disciplines. For me, in the beginning, it was my all. —V. S. Naipaul1 “Form,” we are told, is an abstraction, a “mischievous” concept.2 Formalism—the practice of reading and critical discourse that “form” spawns—registers as much a “desire for form” as an identification or analysis thereof.3 It says as much about the investments (or fetishes) of the reader as about the text in which she locates formal work, or beauty, or accomplishment. To the literary historian, “form” becomes operative at moments when the discourse of formalism feeds into the self-understanding, and eventually the practice, of writers themselves. One such moment—in this case, a rather extended one—encompassed those mid- to late-twentieth-century writers and critics born into restive British colonies, or during the first years of independence. For many writers of the decolonizing world, and for the theorists of postcolonialism who followed them, “form” took on historical and spatial concreteness. It is often now posited that “formalism” might be applied to these colonial, anti- or postcolonial texts, but it is not generally suggested that questions of form and formalism helped define the emergence of postcolonialism itself as a mode of critique. I contend, in what follows, that they did. This essay describes three sites of reading. These sites exemplify reading habits that were paradigmatic of historical moments within Britain and its (former) colonies: first, that of pre-war colonialism; second that of the nationalist anti-colonial moment on the cusp of constitutional independence; and third, the later twentieth-century moment in which academic engagement with colonialism [End Page 765] crystallized—in Britain—into postcolonial theory. The first, a fictional example, sees Naipaul’s Mr Biswas, an underemployed sign painter in colonial Trinidad, reading British magazines “for the letters” before going on to read them for the “stories.”4 The second sees Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a year after Trinidadian independence and the breakdown of the West Indian Federation, present A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean periodical Bim as doing exemplary formal work: modeling on the level of form the exigency of participation in emerging national communities. The third sees Homi K. Bhabha in Thatcherite England in the 1980s—the “heyday of high theory and low spirits”—return to the same novel to articulate what he would later call “the postcolonial perspective.”5 The function of “form” in each case becomes a point of contention for these readers; to read—in these examples—is to contend with form. Rather than viewing these sites of reading as discrete instances—colonial, anti-colonial, postcolonial—these debates about form constitute a thread which allows us to view them comparatively, as a genealogy. Bhabha and Naipaul have seen their stock fall over recent years, while the term postcolonial that links them commands an increasingly slim constituency. Edward W. Said’s strident attacks on Naipaul in the late 1980s—in which he described him as a strategic, non-white mouthpiece of Western neo-imperialism—have never been refuted.6 And Bhabha’s critical method of intricate poststructural close-reading has been seen as politically ambivalent perhaps not least because his muse Naipaul’s politics are so obviously and irredeemably bad. This essay takes no programmatic position regarding the value of the work of Naipaul or Bhabha (or that of Brathwaite) in contemporary critical or pedagogic practice; rather, it views the prominence of these authors in particular periods as facts of literary history. Even if less widely read or cited than formerly, these writers were nonetheless foundational figures in strands of colonial, anti-, and postcolonial thought concerned with the concept of the literary and its formal manifestations. The strands of anti- and postcolonial thought for which the names Brathwaite and Bhabha (respectively) became bywords are misunderstood if not seen in terms of the literary corpus on which they draw, in which Naipaul enjoyed great prominence. The ideological contrasts between the Eurocentric assimilationist Naipaul...

‘What if literary criticism’ Eric Hayot asks in a recent essay, ‘were one of the major nonfictional genres of the twentieth century? What if we were to write a history of that genre, not as a story of schools of thought succeeding one another (New Criticism to New Historicism), but as a history of experiments in structure, rhetoric, and style?’ (‘Academic Writing, I Love You’, Critical Inquiry 41 p. 61). In Radical Empiricists , Helen Thaventhiran does precisely this, in the context of a cluster of ‘modernist’ critics—T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson, R.P. Blackmur, and Marianne Moore—whose prose writings have been most reductively treated when described through the doctrinal lens (that is, as exemplars of the ‘New Criticism’) rather than as ‘experiments in structure, rhetoric, and style’. Thaventhiran’s argument is not only that the oeuvres of the likes of Empson and Richards are too complex and interesting to be collapsed into the hygienic New Critical tenets of Cleanth Brooks (though this is a position she is committed to), but—more importantly—that these bodies of prose are in themselves a central part of modernist literature. The forms of critical consciousness that each of these writers developed can be read as attempts to grapple with a central modernist concern: ‘meaning’. ‘Criticism’, she writes, ‘is always a matter of being “about,” shaping itself as language alongside, around, pointing to, representing, or concerned with other words’. ‘Within the modernist crisis of meaning’—by which she refers to the thicket of philosophical and literary debate that surrounded this key word ‘meaning’ during the first decades of the century—‘this fundamental quality of critical discourse, its “aboutness,” comes to attention in heightened form’ (p. 3).