Abstract
The purpose of this volume is to provide the reader with the appropriate facts and critical guidance in what will be still to many the relatively new, or even unknown, field of Commonwealth literature. Literary studies in English are dominated by the immensely rich achievement of English literature through the centuries, and by the current movement of writing in Britain and the United States. (It would be more appropriate, certainly in England, to invert the order of interest and to say dominated by writing first in the United States and secondly in Britain.) Commonwealth literature itself is of course a term of art. The Commonwealth is an increasingly impalpable and metaphysical conception. Even to define it would require a practised lawyer, and to point to where it exists, an accomplished politician. Here one is concerned with writing in English outside Britain and the United States. Which writers have made a significant use of the resources of the language to embody their experience and view of life ? Which of them are of more than local importance ? Which of them, judged by appropriate standards, have added to the canon of literature in English and realised in a creative way capacities implicit in the language ? One harps constantly on the language because the existence of a work of literature depends not on the writer alone but also on the degree of maturity the language it is written in has reached, just as its complexity and fineness depends on the range of resources within the language. One thing will certainly become clear from the work of the writers considered in this book, namely the amazing capacity of the English language to express an immense span of sensibility, whether West Indian, Canadian, Australian, African, New Zealand, or Indian, a testimony not just to the gifts of the individual writers but to the genius of the language itself.
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Reading List
1. Bibliographies, handbooks, etc.
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© 1979 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Walsh, W. (1979). Introduction. In: Commonwealth Literature. Great Writers Library. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86101-9_1
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