A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English

The editors assert that the “injunction ‘always historicise’ reverberates like a mantra in postcolonial literary criticism” and their belief in this statement shapes this densely packed new volume from Edinburgh University Press's Postcolonial Studies series. The Companion (thus called as it goes beyond the work of a dictionary or encyclopedia to refer readers on to new avenues of thought and reading in the bibliographies given for each subject entry) is dizzying in its scope and detail: the index of literary works referenced runs for 22 pages in very small font and the 220 entries by 160 contributors are a testament...