Bøger af Paul Sharrad

A Short History of Australian Literature fills a gap in study materials for Indian readers interested in a country that shares a lot of colonial history, many sporting ties, and increasing diasporic connections. Australia is, however, a unique land that has developed its own idioms, cultural mix, and literature. This book introduces the major writers across two centuries, places them in historical contexts of political and social change, and provides a glossary of local usages and a list of reference materials.

This book is the successful outcome of a difficult feat it represents an interesting new approach to a well-trodden field of study. In this collection of essays, the author revisits certain issues within the distinctive frames of each essay. Of particular interest is the way the author is continually mindful of how postcolonial studies might be reconceptualised an approach that many critics of note have taken in recent years, especially Neil Lazarus, Reed Dasenbrock, and Bart Moore-Gilbert, in different ways. This author s way is, in part, to reconsider postcolonial literary history against ideas of History as a dominant epistemology. Another refreshing take here too is the way in which the theoretical positions are meaningfully explored in the context of imaginative literary texts; the book brings together the best scholarly qualities of close reading and a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of theory and the history that cloaks everything. This book is a very significant contribution to postcolonial studies and advances the ever more richly complicated discourse that has emerged in the field.

Albert Wendt is the leading writer and exponent of Pacific literature. His work is consistently different in style, politically challenging, and ranges across essays, plays, poems, stories and novels, two of which have been filmed. This book is the first full-length study of his work. There is an introduction to Pacific literature as a whole and Wendt's Samoan background. Chapters offer readings of all Wendt's major texts in chronological sequence, relating them to his essays, to literary movements of the time and to key motifs from Polynesian culture. There is an extensive bibliography of works by and about Wendt.