3 Review(s)

As the title Writing Difference: Nationalism, Identity and Literature suggests, the dominant theme of the book is nation and its inevitable concomitants, namely identity and difference. These problematics have been studied both in terms of theory and practice. So far as practice is concerned, it has always been socially and culturally specific. Nation as a phenomenon cuts across all boundaries—social, cultural, political and geographical—all over the world. Identity is the chief question that inheres in nation and nationalism as a problematic, both in its colonial and postcolonial passages. In this connection, difference and heterogeneity are here centrestaged for its determination, and these can best be represented in literature. So emphasis has been laid on literary texts written in English based on different perceptions of the writers concerned. The contributors have selected their texts for analyses accordingly, articulating theoretically the underlying narratives of the nations across the world. The spectrum is wide enough to embrace nations and cultures like Asian, Irish, Jewish, Australian, American and European. Some texts are known, while some others are recent ones. But all of them provide new critical dimensions for understanding the emerging problems related to the postcolonial period of decolonization when the national situation appears to be still bedevilled by the legacies of colonialism. The other questions raised are those of identities of the diasporas, and ethnic communities within the postcolonial nations. Renewed critical and theoretical light has been shed on all these questions in terms of twenty-five well-written and well-referenced critical articles. The book is expected to be a good textual reading for all interested in the subject.