This collection of essays is based on papers that were delivered at the XIth Annual Conference on Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in German-Speaking Countries, which was organized jointly by the "Institut für Anglistik" of the University of Aachen and the "Centre d’enseignement et de recherche en études du Commonwealth" of the University of Liège in June 1988.

Table of contents

Introduction

Writers

Mudrooroo NAROGIN (Colin JOHNSON)
Celebration of a Nation

Wilson HARRIS
Oedipus and the Middle Passage

Edward Kamau BRATHWAITE
History, the Caribbean Writer and X/Self

Michael GILKES
The Creature from the Blue Lagoon

David DABYDEEN
On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today

Fay ZWICKY
The Deracinated Writer: Another Australia

Cilla McQUEEN
"Living Here"

Literature and Language

Albert GERARD
Literature, Language, Nation and the Commonwealth

Chantal ZABUS
Under the Palimpsest and Beyond: The "Original" in the West African Europhone Novel

S.A.K. MLACHA
Crisis and Conflict in East African Literature: Cultural and Ethnic Identity in the Works of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Christian MAIR
Contrasting Attitudes Towards the Use of Creole in Fiction - A Comparison of Two Early Novels by V.S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon

Anjuli GUPTA
English Writing in India: Fear of Experimentation, Fear of Appropriation - Death of Creativity?

Literature and Liberation

Taban LO LIYONG
Ayi Kwei Armah in Two Moods

Joseph SWANN
From Things Fall Apart to Anthills of the Savannah: The Changing Face of History in Achebe's Novels

James GIBBS
The BBC Became a Glutton for Punishment: Wole Soyinka's Dealings with the BBC (1953-1959)

Adrian ROSCOE
Raw Pieces of Liberation: Poetry of Edison Mpina

Charles SARVAN
Dominic Mulaisho's The Smoke that Thunders: The Use and Misuse of Politics in Fiction

Wendy WOODWARD
Calling a Spade a Muck Dig: Discourse and Gender in Some Novels by Christina Stead

Peter H. MARSDEN
Paradise Mislaid: the Hostile Reception of Les A. Murray's Poem "The Liberated Plague"

Marc DELREZ
"Antipodean Dialogue": R. Stowe and D. Malouf

Don GRANT
Seeking the Self: Imagination and Autobiography in Some Recent Australian Writing

Multiculturalism and Ethnicity

Alastair NIVEN
Black British Writing: The Struggle for Recognition

D.C.R.A. GOONETILLEKE
Sri Lanka's "Ethnic" Conflict in its Literature in English

Ganesh N. DEVY
The Multicultural Context of Indian Literature in English

Aleid FOKKEMA
English Ideas of Indianness: The Reception of Salman Rushdie

Gerhard STILZ
"Live in Fragments no Longer": A Conciliatory Analysis of Ahmed Ali's Twilight

Jackie KAY
"The Visit"

Mudrooroo NAROGIN
Paperbark

Christopher BALME
The Aboriginal Theatre of Jack Davis

Jackie KAY
"Years Later"

Brian OXLEY
Orphans in the Novel: Identity Crisis and Identity Formation with Special Reference to the New Literatures in English

Reconstructions of History

Nelson WATIIE
The New Zealand Land Wars in Novels by Shadbolt and Ihimaera

Christine PAGNOULLE
"Labyrinths of Past/Present/Future" in Some of Kamau Brathwaite's Recent Poems

Doireann MacDERMOTT
Variations of a Princely Theme: Kamala Markandaya's The Golden Honeycomb

Gender as Politics

Jackie KAY
"Angela Davis"

Lucia NANKOE and Essa REIJMERS
To Keep the Past Alive: A Theoretical Approach to Novels of Black Women Writers

Bénédicte CORHAY-LEDENT
Between Conflicting Worlds: Female Exiles in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Joan Riley's The Unbelonging

Omar SOUGOU
The Experience of an African Woman in Britain: A Reading of Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen

Edward Kamau BRATHWAITE
"Aachen"

Contributors