Colonial and postcolonial literature cover

Colonial and postcolonial literature

by Elleke Boehmer

Wole Soyinka, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee - postcolonial writers from around the world now enjoy wide popularity. In this book, Elleke Boehmer looks challengingly at the history of such writing, how it developed and how it departs from writing in the Empire in the Victorian period. Throughout this literature key themes and images - journeying, loss, the search for community, the arrival of the stranger - are expanded and redefined. Boehmer discusses these with reference to a broad range of texts, from Trollope, Kipling, Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield, to authors as recent as Ben Okri and Michael Ondaatje, and the Aboriginal Australians Sally Morgan and Mudrooroo.

Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?