Critical Perspective

Abstract

It is, admittedly, somewhat unusual for a critical study of the present kind not to start off with a detailed and exhaustive consideration of its own rigidly theoretical premises, according to which the literature under consideration may be approached. The reason for my choice of a less common procedure was, however, prompted by my curiosity to see what kinds of theoretical issues would be brought up with the focus on specifically literary reactions to Britain in the process of social and cultural change attributable largely to the ‘implosion’ of Empire. Mass immigration, remnants of Empire ties, a tendency for Britain to be splitting up into regions, enhancement of gender issues and the development of a social structure too complex to be thought of in terms of class are all part of the same picture, that of a country having formerly imposed its own stamp of a well-ordered and ruly body politic on large parts of a more or less willing world but now having to cope with imperial aftermath from a much-reduced platform of power and within a much-reduced world order.

It is a question whether the majority of writers between Canada and New Zealand actually share a major interest in anticolonial discourse and transcultural hybridity or are at least just as interested in the situation of the individual in her or his immediate surroundings and against the background of the changing modern world in which such concerns are only of secondary importance.

(Eberhard Kreuzer, in Nünning, 1998:437)¹