DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain

C L Innes author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:14th Aug '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain cover

The first extended study of black and Asian writing in Britain, now updated and available in paperback.

Now updated and available in paperback, this is the first extended study of black and Asian writing in Britain over the last 250 years. This volume offers a rich historical background for understanding contemporary British multicultural society and culture and will be of interest to literary and cultural historians.Now updated and available in paperback, this is the first extended study of black and Asian writing in Britain over the last 250 years. Beginning with authors who arrived as immigrants or slaves in the mid-eighteenth century, Innes includes a detailed discussion of works that were often enormously popular in their own time but are almost unknown to contemporary readers. Innes's fascinating study reveals a history of vigorous and fertile interaction between black, Asian and white intellectuals and communities, and an enormously rich and varied literary culture which was already in existence before the post-war efflorescence of black and Asian writing. Utilising a wealth of archival material, Innes examines their work as part of an acceptance of and challenge to British cultural and ideological discourses. This volume offers a rich historical background for understanding contemporary British multicultural society and culture and will be of interest to literary and cultural historians.

'… a pioneering history of black and Asian writing in Britain … what makes this book a significant contribution to the continuing debate on the identity of Britain is its meticulous reconstruction of black and Asian writing in the country over a period of almost five hundred years … There is no doubt that as a literary history this book fills a gaping hole in our understanding of black and Asian writing in Britain.' Simon Gikandi
'Innes offers detailed, critically informed readings of several black and Asian writers in Britain … Both in terms of the historical terrain it covers and the writings it references and/or analyzes, Innes's study is likely to prove an invaluable resource and reference tool for people writing about and/or teaching anglophone (including mainstream white British) cultural and literary production in the colonial metropole.' Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Research in African Literatures
'It is hard to fault C. L. Innes for the wealth of primary and secondary research and scholarship on which she expertly draws or for her analytic observations on the complexity of the experience and attitudes of Black and Asian British writers.' Steven Barfield
'With the panorama of writing it unfolds and its excellent scholarship, this study is essential reading. It belongs in every university library.' Zeitschrift für Anglistik unk Amerikanistik

ISBN: 9780521719681

Dimensions: 228mm x 152mm x 21mm

Weight: 550g

340 pages

2nd Revised edition