Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation
by Imre Szeman

Writers from countries that were recently European colonies often find themselves divided between their local culture and the demands of cosmopolitan, Westernized literary culture.

In Zones of Instability, Imre Szeman (McMaster University) examines the complex relationship between literature and history by exploring key works from the nationalist literatures of former British colonies in the Caribbean and Africa. Through close readings of works by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul, Szeman explores the ways in which the idea of nationalism and literature are inexorably entwined. In the best of these works, he finds, the "nation" can be read as that space in which literature brings together two elements that history has separated: the writer and the people. (January, 240 pages, $45 hardcover)

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