This is a learned, lucid and innovative book by one of the leading scholars in the field. At once a very useful resource for students and also a major contribution to scholarly thinking, it offers a refreshing new perspedive on key postcolonial novels in English and the theoretical debates these texts have sparked. Lane's rare talent for explaining complex theoretical concepts while preserving the inherent difficulty of these ideas is fully engaged here. The Postcolonial Novel is the best study of its kind to date in postcolonial studies.

In The PostcolonialNovel, Richard J. Lane offers his readers wonderfully open and fresh readings of some of the most important works in the canon such as Palace of the Peacock, Things Fall Apart, Foe and Surfacing. With these readings he brings his theoretical expertise to bear in subterranean ways that illuminate the texts while foregrounding the pleasures and intricacies of their stories. Readers less experienced in postcolonial theory than Lane is will have no difficulty following his approach and they will, as I have, come away from this book convinced that, in large part, postcolonial theorists like Spivak, Bhabha, Said, Foucault and Genette developed their ideas in tandem with the creative writers or, indeed, in response to these novels.

The Postcoloniol Novel provides a concise and invaluable introdudion to the rise of postcolonial literatures in English through close readings of seminal novels. These novels - which continue to generate debate long after publication and have influenced the ways in which we think about literature and literary studies - provide an ideal entry point to the subjed for students. Each main chapter begins with a helpful introdudory overview, and then closely reads a key novel before moving on to examine the impact and significance of that particular text. The book as a whole works to introduce and explain the emergence of theoretical discourse from these close readings,drawing extensively upon leading indigenous and western critics and theorists. Students will be encouraged to use this book to debate a wide range of critical issues that have been generated by postcolonial literatures.

Preface and Acknowledgements

1  Introducing the Postcolonial Novel in English:

Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock

2  The Counter-Canonical Novel: J.M. Coetzee's Foe and

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

3  Alternative Historiographies: Chinua Achebe's

Things Fall Apart

4  National Consciousness: Ngvgi wa Thiong'o's

A Grain of Wheat

5  Interrogating Subjectivity: Bessie Head's A Question of Power

6  Recoding Narrative: Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

7  The Rushdie Affair: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

8  The Optical Unconscious: Arundhati Roy's

The God of Small Things

Conclusion: Ending with Joy Kogawa's Obasan and

Phyllis Greenwood's An Interrupted Panorama

Notes

Bibliography

Index