Literature · Modern & Contemporary Literature
A topic within Modern & Contemporary Literature, itself one of 11 topics in that field and part of Literature.
No prior grounding assumed.
Nobel Lecture: Writing
Abdulrazak Gurnah · 2021
Traces how a colonial education in Zanzibar and a later life as a refugee in England produced two irreconcilable versions of the same history, and…
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Nobel Lecture: He and His Man
J. M. Coetzee · 2003
Restages Robinson Crusoe as a fictional dialogue between Crusoe and the obscure 'man' who supposedly wrote him down, arguing that authorship is…
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Abdulrazak Gurnah
Traces how a colonial education in Zanzibar and a later life as a refugee in England produced two irreconcilable versions of the same history, and argues that fiction exists to hold both versions open rather than resolve them into one account.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. M. Coetzee
Restages Robinson Crusoe as a fictional dialogue between Crusoe and the obscure 'man' who supposedly wrote him down, arguing that authorship is itself a form of colonisation in which the writer claims and rewrites a life that was never fully his to tell.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Katherine Hallemeier
Argues that Nigerian and South African novels sustain a stubborn 'postcolonial optimism' — an unresolved, ambivalent hope for national freedom — that simultaneously helps American imperial power reproduce itself and keeps alive the counter-imaginaries that might end it.
208 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026