Overview
- First full-length study to explore the question of broad literary Indian Ocean continuities and differences
- Focuses on novelists Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad
- Examines the intersection of oceanic and maritime studies with postcolonial literature
Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature (NCWL)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and world—Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collen—alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.
Reviews
--Margaret Cohen, Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, Stanford University, USA
"This is the Indian Ocean book we’ve all been waiting for. In the silkiest of prose, Lavery creates a shimmering re-configuration of anglophone novels on the Indian Ocean. This study revisits the cardinal points of debates on the novel and world literature, radiating insights like a dazzling compass rose."--Isabel Hofmeyr, Global Distinguished Professor, NYU, USA, and Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
“Charne Lavery’s work is an invaluable addition to the growing corpus of work on space production and cultural representation. By examining the work of major contemporary writers – Ghosh, Gurnah and Collen – the work offers a rare understanding of connected histories that bear the potential of re-centering the Indian Ocean world and of interrogating received assumptions.”
--Lakshmi Subramanian, Professor of History, HSS BITS, Pilani, Goa, India
“Charne Lavery’s path-opening book offers the first extended study of how the Indian Ocean has been composed as world in literary works produced and set around its basin. In so doing, it presents vital new understandings of how this oceanic world harbours alternative modernities and opens to non-Eurocentric futures while shifting the domain of world literary attention offshore and southwards.”
--Meg Samuelson, Associate Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing & Film, University of Adelaide, Australia
“Through vivid and nuanced close readings of a range of novels, this book explores the Indian Ocean as a distinct literary geography. Alert to debates that are shaping critical approaches to fictions in English, it also offers a significant contribution to our understanding of world literatures.”--Stephanie Jones, Associate Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Charne Lavery is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and Research Fellow on the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Writing Ocean Worlds
Book Subtitle: Indian Ocean Fiction in English
Authors: Charne Lavery
Series Title: New Comparisons in World Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87116-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-87115-4Published: 31 December 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-87118-5Published: 01 January 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-87116-1Published: 01 January 2022
Series ISSN: 2634-6095
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6109
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 178
Topics: Literature, general, Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature