The Internationalization of English Literature

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more.

Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers.

In the future will there be a literary history of England, or will it be an English-language literary history? This important volume in the new Oxford English Literary History covers colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant writers since 1948. After the wave of decolonization following World War II and the growth of large immigrant communities in England, Bruce King asks the questions: Can we still talk of the English nation as a cultural unit? What does it mean to be British, English, or national? In his broad-ranging discussion, he covers such topics as Black British Poetry and Drama, Commonwealth Literature, and British African Literature, and looks in depth at writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith.

King writes from the conviction that it is wrong to assume that national cultures are finished. As he lucidly and persuasively demonstrates, a large, accomplished, socially significant body of writing in England sits between and overlaps with an older British tradition and its various sub-divisions, new national literatures, a post-imperial Commonwealth tradition, and contemporary global literature.

Bruce King is a former lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. His publications include New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, Modern Indian Poetry in English, Three Indian Poets, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.