bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Morrison, Arthur
Authors: Alexander Sarah C.
Published: June 2017

Arthur Morrison (1863–1945), fiction writer, journalist, and collector and authority on Japanese art, is best known for his fiction about life in London's East End. Morrison's
Tales of Mean Streets
(1894) and
A Child of the Jago
(1896) established him as a prominent figure of fin‐de‐siècle realism.
Music
Authors: da Sousa Correa Delia
Published: June 2017

Victorian literature is richly connected with musical culture. Scholars investigating music and Victorian literature have illuminated relationships between music and Victorian science, music and “the woman question,” and music and social reform. These connections were underpinned by a consensus that music worked as a language for the emotions that could foster sympathy and community. However, music was also a potentially dangerous sensual power. This paradox is particularly evident in gendered representations of music and in debates on the woman question. Scenes of music making in Victorian novels communicate a great deal about music's cultural importance, as do copious figurative allusions to music in Victorian literature. Romantic idealization of music was also fundamental to the ways in which writers employed musical tropes and readers interpreted them. Musical metaphor represents the affective power of literature and the ideals and aspirations of writers. At the same time, music in Victorian literature maintains an insistent nonmetaphorical connection with the listening experience. Despite the historical gap in listening experience then and now, musical allusion remains important to the affective power of Victorian texts, and the interdisciplinary study of music and Victorian literature enriches understanding of Victorian culture.
Nesbit, Edith
Authors: Pierce Heidi
Published: June 2017

Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), who published as “E. Nesbit,” was a prolific late Victorian and early twentieth‐century poet, short‐story writer, and novelist. Her most enduring and beloved works remain her children's books, particularly
The Railway Children
(1906), the Psammead Trilogy (1902–6), and the Bastable Trilogy (1899–1904). Incorporating magical and realistic adventures into her children's books, Nesbit helped change nineteenth‐century conventions of children's literature. Recent scholarship on Nesbit primarily focuses on how her works affect the social and intellectual development of children, but critics have also addressed Nesbit's work through the ideological lenses of class, gender, nationality, and imperialism. Additionally, she is a founder of the Fabian Society – the Victorian socialist group.
Novel, three‐volume (triple‐decker)
Authors: Menke Richard
Published: June 2017

From the 1830s until the mid‐1890s, the three‐volume novel, or triple‐decker, was one of the most distinctive Victorian literary forms. Yet the expensive three‐volume format was hardly the most popular one for novels; it was neither used for all kinds of novels nor available or intended for all readers. Rather, three‐volume novels were published to be bought by private circulating libraries such as Mudie's Select Library. By the 1880s and well into the 1890s, many critics came associate triple‐deckers with the sensibility and moral standards of the libraries and their subscribers.
Pathetic fallacy
Authors: Kreisel Deanna K.
Published: June 2017

Art critic and historian John Ruskin coined the phrase “pathetic fallacy” to refer to the attribution of human qualities to inanimate (usually natural) objects. While Ruskin believed that the technique could be effective and even admirable in certain circumstances, he also claimed that poets of the “first order” rarely indulged in its use and that its repeated usage marked a poet as belonging to the “second rank” of artists.
Body and Literature
Authors: Zemka Sue
Published: June 2017

In the nineteenth century, a variety of factors increased the gap between the body and subjectivity. Economics, evolutionary biology, medicine, neurology and physiology all made the human body a complexly detailed object of knowledge, and in ways that accentuated the difference between having a body and being a person. Political developments also added to this difference by making a person's biological existence subject to an elaborate system of institutional powers – what Foucault calls systems of “biopower.” Photography captured images of the body with exactitude and detail; factory production maximized the human body's functionality: these developments also accentuated the gap between embodiment and selfhood. The literature of the period responded to these influences in its exploration of disembodied and embodied points of view. Images of normativity began to change, such that what were formerly seen as eccentric, disabled, or unusual forms of embodiment became representative of what it means to be human in a modern world. Here and elsewhere, we see that for Victorians being a subject meant having a body that was an object to one's self – to one's perception, manipulation, and highly contingent control.
Brontё, Charlotte
Authors: Morse Deborah Denenholz
Published: June 2017

Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) was a Victorian novelist of Irish and Cornish lineage who was raised in Haworth Parsonage, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In her short, tragic life she completed only four novels:The Professor, Jane Eyre,Shirley, andVillette.Jane Eyreis one of the most influential novels ever written. Charlotte wrote with her sisters Emily and Anne, whose work has also become famous. The three sisters are unique in the history of English literature and possess a lasting mystique for both readers and scholars
Prosopography
Authors: Booth Alison
Published: June 2017

Prosopography carried two prevalent meanings among Victorians: representation of one person's physical traits; and collective biography. Different techniques of portraiture contributed to illustrated series and books of biographies of eminent men, alongside collections that advocated women and other outsiders as contributors to society. German classical scholarship introduced a third meaning of the term: a method for analyzing data about groups of individual lives, especially in early periods, where documentation is scarce. The Victorian trend was to represent unique individuals in more inclusive circles of recognition, although the forms and methods of prosopography can also be used to reinforce the exclusive norms of elites.
Prostitution
Authors: Frederickson Kathleen
Published: June 2017

At least until the 1860s, literary texts about prostitution tended to depict prostitutes as cut off from their families and former friends, subject to economic destitution, declining health, and early death. Many Victorian writers tended to combine this sense of the prostitute's inevitable decline with the belief that prostitution as a whole was a miasma or a pollutant that harmed the health, both physical and moral, of the social body. Such a depiction does not capture the complex lived realities for most women, men, and gender nonconfirming people who worked in the sex trade. By the end of the century prostitution had helped constitute the sensationalistic “new journalism,” in part as a result of successful and well‐publicized campaigns to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.
Religion
Authors: Knight Mark
Published: June 2017

The religious beliefs of Victorian Britain were extensive and varied. Although Christianity was not the only religious tradition in the period, it was the most influential, and its presence can be found in a wide variety of literature. This includes the writing of authors who identified themselves as religious and works that explicitly engaged with theological ideas. But the presence of Christianity is also visible in literature that is less explicitly marked as religious, and also in literature that is critical of aspects of the theological tradition.
Humor and wit
Authors: Rosenthal Jesse
Published: June 2017

Wit and humor were significant parts of Victorian culture, but there was a good amount of debate about the morally correct way to present nonserious topics, and even about whether it was appropriate to laugh. If we wish to understand the importance of comedy to Victorian culture, it is important to understand what the experiences of wit and humor meant to the Victorians.
Ruskin, John
Authors: Weltman Sharon Aronofsky
Published: June 2017

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the premier Victorian critic, historian, and theorist of art and architecture; but he also wrote influentially on aesthetics, political economy, literary theory, ecology, ethics, gender roles, and art's relationship to science. He inspired the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement; in the early twentieth century, the ideas he had expressed in
Unto This Last
(1860) helped found the English Labour Party and caused Gandhi to change his life in ways that ultimately resulted in India's independence from the British Empire. His
Collected Works
fill thirty‐nine volumes. Ruskin promoted ideas seen by many in his own time – and today – as too radically conservative, too radically progressive, or too strange; but, no matter
what
he said,
how
he said it has continually earned him admiration as one of the greatest prose stylists in the nineteenth century.
Science writers, female
Authors: Lightman Bernard
Published: June 2017

Female writers capitalized on the growing need of publishers to find authors who could churn out science books that would attract the attention of the rapidly growing Victorian reading audience. So many of them became involved in this activity that it is accurate to refer to this period as a golden age for female popularizers of science. In opposition to the attempts of elite scientists like T. H. Huxley, who pushed to secularize science, these women told their readers that nature was filled with religious meaning and divine purpose. Through their use of innovative narratives and accessible language, they played a major role in shaping the way in which the British public understood the larger significance of modern science.
Novel, silver‐fork
Authors: Sadoff Dianne F.
Published: June 2017

Between 1824, when Theodore Hook's sketches
Sayings and Doings
were published as a volume, and 1841, when Catherine Gore's
Cecil, a Peer
, appeared, the silver‐fork novel was among the most popular fictional modes. This subgenre rewrote Jane Austen's narratives for a more exclusive class and for a new, reform‐minded middling reader with class aspirations, thus preparing for the mid‐century emergence of William Makepeace Thackeray's and Charles Dickens's novels.
Sport
Authors: Bateman Anthony
Published: June 2017

Given the exalted national and imperial status it gained during the period, sport might appear surprisingly under‐represented in Victorian literature. While significant sporting episodes do appear in Victorian literature, and while meaningful references to sport are not uncommon, the work of the period's now canonical authors only rarely assigned sport a dominant role. If, however, consideration is given to the output of so‐called “minor” Victorian writers alongside the specialist sports literature that expanded exponentially in circulation and popularity during the period, a very different picture emerges. When viewed from this more pluralistic perspective, literature can be understood as not simply reflecting sport's changing meaning and status during the Victorian era, but as positively constitutive of that process of change.
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Authors: Fisher Judith L.
Published: June 2017

William Makepeace Thackeray during and after his lifetime provoked vehement, opposing reactions to his novels. His expansive social novels manifest a variety of narrative personae who are self‐conscious about their writing and suspicious of narrative authority. Critical discussion of Thackeray's work has focused on his narratorial strategies, his narrative commentary, his supposed inability to create a plot, his moral positionings, and the tendency, from the very beginning of critical appraisal, to identify Thackeray the man with the narrators of the essays and novels.
Theater
Authors: Newey Katherine
Published: June 2017

The theater was an important part of Victorian popular culture, and a significant vehicle for the representation of contemporary life and expression of political and topical commentary. Although the theater struggled within the complex and constraining regulation of censorship and state control, theatrical activity was entrepreneurial and innovative throughout the nineteenth century. The genres of melodrama, farce, and pantomime demonstrate the inventiveness of dramatic writing in creating vehicles for expressive and skillful performances.
Trollope, Anthony
Authors: Michie Elsie B.
Published: June 2017

Producing forty‐seven novels, five volumes of collected short stories, four large travel books, an autobiography, several biographies, and four collections of sketches, among other works, Anthony Trollope was one of the most prolific nineteenth‐century British writers. Famed for his endearing depictions of the commonplace, he rose to extraordinary popularity in the 1850s and 1860s, particularly through the Barsetshire novels, his evolving series of works about the English Church. His novels became slightly less popular in the latter decades of his career as he turned to subjects that were at once more political and more pessimistic. Despite this turn, he remained widely read throughout his career. His novels continue to intrigue modern readers, providing a faithful portrait of nineteenth‐century life that both reflects and comments on the dramatic political and social changes of that era.
Turner, Charles Tennyson
Authors: Cunningham Valentine
Published: June 2017

Charles Tennyson Turner (1808–79), elder brother of Alfred Lord Tennyson, was one of the most prolific writers of sonnets in the Victorian period, a period that saw a resurgence of interest in that generic form. His many self‐referential sonnets make him the period's strongest theorist of the sonnet's power.
Visual culture in literature
Authors: Plunkett John
Published: June 2017

New visual and optical media, together with the improvement and consequent invigorated usage of existing devices and technologies, were a defining feature of Victorian culture. These visual technologies were often linked with changes in the modern sensorium; different modes of visuality became the crucible for working through broader philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural issues. Writers were particularly engaged in notions of visuality because of the way conceptions of literary realism drew on visual tropes. Illustrated versions of novels and poems were also part of the two‐way exchange between literature and visual culture.
Wood, Ellen
Authors: Mangham Andrew
Published: June 2017

Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood (1814–87) was one of the bestselling British novelists of the nineteenth century. Best known for her sensation novelEast Lynne(1861), she published over forty novels in addition to scores of essays, reviews, and short stories. Though conservative in tone, much of her work focused on issues that encouraged radical and controversial debate, including marriage legislation, women's rights, class, industrialism, and religion. Vastly popular in her own century, yet unpopular throughout much of the twentieth, she is now attracting increasing amounts of attention from critics who view her works as central to developments in popular literature, gothic fiction, sensationalism, and nineteenth‐century interdisciplinarity.
Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline
Authors: Kuper Adam
Published: June 2017

This entry presents an overview of the scope and reach of anthropology as a discipline and of its growth from its intellectual roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to its concerns and dilemmas in the present day. Key movements and the influence of founding scholars are outlined and themes introduced that are explored in detail elsewhere in the encyclopedia.
Children, Impacts of Development on
Authors: Boyden Jo , Zharkevich Ina
Published: June 2017

Children are central to the neoliberal development agenda internationally and nationally across most low‐ and middle‐income countries, human‐capital and child‐rights frameworks being deployed as justification. In this context, a focus on child survival and schooling has improved child wellbeing practically everywhere. However, by approaching children as a discrete category in possession of distinct rights, development as practice and discourse has given rise to a particular model of childhood that depoliticizes and decontextualizes this life phase and belies the diverse realities of children's lives. Childhood is romanticized as free from responsibility or hardship and is instrumentalized as the foundation for future individual and societal advancement. This conception has growing symbolic and practical value, transforming children's roles, responsibilities, time use, and relationships and fostering them as new social subjects whose lifeworlds are focused on education, consumption, and leisure. It is thereby gradually displacing all other models of childhood.
Cannibalism in the Ethnographic Record
Authors: Pickering Michael
Published: June 2017

Cannibalism is a popular and recurring subject in anthropology, experiencing periodic resurgences in interest. Its practice was alleged in writings accumulated over several centuries. By the time the discipline of anthropology emerged, cannibalism was already considered a real, and thus expected, practice in some cultures, especially nonliterate cultures encountered by colonizing European nations. Scholarly research since the mid‐twentieth century has increasingly refuted the idea that the cannibalism reported in many early accounts was actually a customary practice in any culture. This entry considers the nature of historical reports of cannibalism and presents some of the many considerations that must be applied in considering such accounts as reliable evidence.
Alatas, Syed Hussein
Authors: Zubillaga‐Pow Jun
Published: June 2017

In his lifetime, Professor Syed Hussein Alatas held many positions, from a politician to a social scientist, from a local community leader to a doting father, but he is best remembered for his many contributions to raising the colonial consciousness of the Malay people.
Allende, Isabel
Authors: Turner Jessie D.
Published: June 2017

Renowned novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende is well known for her multigenerational family sagas and historical fiction that at times utilize magical realism and highlight feminist characters, political resistance, and migration. A key figure in Latin American and women's literature, Allende is also known for her promotion of social justice, a subject that features prominently in her nonliterary work, and which can be seen in her aid of Pinochet victims as well as through The Isabel Allende Foundation.
Andrade, Mário Raul de Morais
Authors: Nunes Zita C.
Published: June 2017

Mário Raul de Morais Andrade is one of Brazil's leading writers. He was born in São Paulo on October 9, 1893 to a family of modest means. A musical prodigy, he graduated in 1917 from the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo (São Paulo Conservatory of Drama and Music), where he subsequently served as a lecturer. Andrade is best known for his role in launching the Brazilian modernist movement in 1922 and for his 1928 masterpiece,
Macunaíma: o herói sem nenhum caráter
(
Macunaíma: The Hero Without Any Character
). His achievements, however, extend much further. As a theorist, poet, novelist, folklorist, musician, musicologist, art and literary critic, newspaper chronicler, and photographer, he has had a profound and lasting effect on Brazilian culture.
Ben Jelloun, Tahar
Authors: Ségeral Nathalie
Published: June 2017

Tahar Ben Jelloun (b. 1944) is a Francophone poet and writer from Morocco, whose daring texts deal with racism in contemporary France, immigration, and otherness. His doctoral dissertation, “La plus haute des solitudes” (“The highest of solitudes”), explored the sexual and psychological problems encountered by unskilled North African immigrant workers in France. One of North Africa's most successful postcolonial writers, Ben Jeloun is increasingly present in the Western media and divides his time between Morocco and Paris. Despite the controversial aspects of some of his engagements concerning the Arab world, his texts are studied in Arab‐speaking universities. While some critics reproach him for writing in French, all his major texts have been translated into Arabic, sometimes by himself.
Camus, Albert
Authors: Ségeral Nathalie
Published: June 2017

Albert Camus was a French writer, philosopher, novelist, and playwright. He was born in 1913 in Algeria, and died in France in 1960. His position during the Algerian war of independence was highly controversial, as he fiercely opposed the independence of Algeria, while also criticizing French colonialism. This resulted in his being rejected by Algerians, and, at the same time, being misunderstood by his fellow citizens, the
pieds‐noirs
. Camus was also hated by the proponents of French colonialism and was forced to leave Algiers under special protection.
L’Étranger
(
The Stranger
) remains his most famous novel. Its main character, Meursault, can be read as an anthem of existentialism and alienation. Camus's philosophy is centered on the question of the absurd, the meaninglessness of life to which man is confronted when looking for a justification for his own existence. The absurd is not a knowledge; it is the result of the discrepancy between two opposite forces. Camus built his philosophy in opposition to Marxism and existentialism, after he broke up his friendship with Jean‐Paul Sartre, and relentlessly fought the various ideologies that deter philosophy from the human. At only 43, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Caribbean Literature, Criticism and Theory
Authors: Shemak April
Published: June 2017

From its earliest beginnings, the field of Caribbean literary studies has been shaped by questions surrounding the definition of “Caribbean” and the role of the writer and other cultural producers in defining it. One could locate an early attempt at self‐definition in Cuban José Martí's “Nuestra America” essay in which he called for a redefinition of “America” to include a collective identity of the Americas beyond US geographical borders, with the Caribbean playing a central role. Martí wrote in defiance of US imperialism that sought to control the region through its nineteenth‐century Manifest Destiny policies. The challenges of ongoing attempts to define the Caribbean lie in its complex historical, political, linguistic, and geographical diversity.
Caribbean Literature in English
Authors: Esprit Schuyler K.
Published: June 2017

Caribbean literature in English comprises fiction, poetry, or drama originating from within the Anglophone Caribbean. Primary concerns of Anglophone Caribbean literature include the effects of slavery and colonialism, race, class, literacy and language, education, gender and sexuality. Authors of Caribbean literature produce and publish representations of West Indian life from within the geographical parameters of the region, but more frequently from European and North American locations. The production and dissemination of Caribbean literature is one area that illustrates the influence of migration on the region, a primary thematic concern in contemporary Caribbean writing.
Caribbean Literature in Spanish
Authors: Alcocer Rudyard J.
Published: June 2017

Given its varied history, geography, and demography, the Spanish‐speaking (Hispanic) Caribbean region has a unique relationship with postcoloniality. Unlike other parts of the world closely associated with postcolonial studies, India and numerous African countries, for instance, the various areas of the Hispanic Caribbean did not attain statehood during the wave of independence movements in the middle of the twentieth century. In addition, the independence movements that transformed much of mainland Spanish America during the first two decades of the nineteenth century did not yield similar results in the principal insular regions of the Hispanic Caribbean. Indeed, with a complex colonial legacy that dates from the beginnings of European activity in the Americas to the present day, the Hispanic Caribbean both challenges and enriches conventional views on postcoloniality. The literature from the region reflects this complexity.
Carpentier, Alejo
Authors: Saumell Rafael E.
Published: June 2017

Alejo Carpentier (1904–80) is one of the most renowned Cuban and Latin American writers of the twentieth century. His work encompasses different creative genres. He created his own literary system, also known as
real maravilloso
(magical realism) which he developed through essays, stories and novels. For Carpentier, being a Caribbean or a Latin American always implies a personal journey towards a syncretic condition. Histories and stories come from numerous sources, narrated in different ideological and cultural spaces, where languages and rhythms from all over the planet coexist. As a result, hybrid identities were formed by adopting and questioning, at the same time, Euro‐centered values. Endless syncretism and assertive otherness constitute the main ground for the baroque and magical realism theories. They are also based in what he calls a series of contexts: racial, economic, chthonic, political, cultural, culinary, lighting and ideological.
Chaudhuri, Amit
Authors: Rajakumar Mohanalakshmi , Sayied Alisha
Published: June 2017

Amit Chaudhuri is an Indian novelist and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is best known for prize‐winning novels that feature the tensions of modern life in Bengali families. The bustling cities of contemporary India are the backdrop for his exploration for the dislocation and isolation experienced by his young male protagonists. Chaudhuri is also a scholar of literature and classical Indian musician.
Climatology
Authors: Dawson Ashley James
Published: June 2017

Climatology is the study of weather patterns as they affect human cultures across time and space. Although the impact of industrial civilization on the global climate has caused increasing alarm over the last three decades, historically speaking the converse scenario has been of paramount concern. It has been the impact of the climate on humanity in general, and on European colonial culture in particular, that has been the prime focus of climatology and cognate fields such as tropical medicine since the beginning of European expansion. Representations of the determining impact of climate on culture have been a key, but surprisingly underacknowledged, constituent element of colonial discourse, dovetailing with and providing the intellectual framework for foundational colonial ideologies such as the scientific racism of the high imperial era.
Columbus, Christopher
Authors: Harmon Lauren Alexandra
Published: June 2017

This entry briefly describes Christopher Columbus's career as a navigator on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. Columbus's proposal and journeys are discussed, followed by a discussion of the logbook that is the primary document for much Columbus scholarship today. The purpose of discussing the logbook at some length is to point to scholarly contributions that have challenged the logbook as a discursive production and have deconstructed it in order to come to new understandings about the earliest contact between Europeans and indigenous people of the Americas. The entry ends with a very brief description of the legacy of colonialism created by the voyages of Columbus.
Culture, Cultural Studies
Authors: Francuski Biljana Djoric
Published: June 2017

In this entry, various attempts at defining the concept of culture are followed by an account of different classifications and theories of culture. The development of cultural studies, which brought together the elements of literary criticism, Marxist theory, sociology, and several other disciplines within the humanities, is then traced from its beginnings in Britain of the 1960s until its current status worldwide. Besides the “founding fathers” of British cultural studies – Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and, still the most influential figure in cultural studies, Stuart Hall – some other important theoreticians in the field are mentioned, as well as those who have criticized cultural studies.
de Lisser, H. G.
Authors: Mathison Ymitri
Published: June 2017

Although he published more than 22 novels, a few travel narratives, and other short pieces, H. G. de Lisser is best known for his editorships of what became a major Jamaican newspaper during his time and remains so,
The Gleaner
, and
Planter's Punch
, an annual magazine, both of which hosted the first publications of his fiction. He was a prolific fiction writer whose reputation rests on his potboiler melodramatic historical romances of the empire, with
The White Witch of Rosehall
being his best known novel. His regional novels included political and social satires, mostly focusing on the brown middle class. De Lisser is mostly ignored by contemporary critics due to his reactionary political and social conservatism which promoted the continued federation of the British Empire against newly developing nationalistic movements.
Du Bois, W. E. B.
Authors: Risam Roopika
Published: June 2017

W. E. B. Du Bois was an African American writer best known for his historical and sociological writing on African American life. Active during the first half of the twentieth century, Du Bois was a scholar and activist central to civil rights movements in the USA until the 1930s, when his disagreements with the black political establishment in the USA – namely, Du Bois's advocacy for anti‐colonial resistance – led to his marginalization. Among the themes in Du Bois's work are the philosophical underpinnings of race; the relationship between imperialism, racism, and capitalism; and the linked fate of African Americans and colonial subjects around the world.
Emecheta, Buchi
Authors: Brown Michelle Lynn
Published: June 2017

Born in Yaba, near Lagos, in 1944, Buchi Emecheta is one of Nigeria's preeminent postcolonial novelists. Her fiction portrays various aspects of being a girl, woman, and mother in Nigeria, particularly how gender and motherhood can liberate or enslave. In accordance with Igbo narrative tradition, Emecheta intends her work to instruct as well as entertain. It addresses such themes as the immigrant experience, poverty, enslavement, and black women's coming of age. She has received numerous awards and is best known for her novels
Second‐Class Citizen
(1974),
The Bride Price
(1976),
The Slave Girl
(1977), and
The Joys of Motherhood
(1979). Emecheta holds a PhD from the University of London and has held academic appointments in the United States, Europe, and Africa. Influenced by fellow Nigerian writer Flora Nwapa, she identifies not as a feminist but as a human, a distinction that echoes other African female writers’ discomfort with Western conceptions of feminism.
Film, Experimental
Authors: Saljoughi Sara
Published: June 2017

This entry examines experimental filmmaking under a postcolonial and/or non‐Western rubric. It examines the reasons why studies of experimental film have excluded postcolonial examples and offers a selected history of different postcolonial experimental film movements.
Finnegan, Ruth
Authors: Ebeogu Afam N.
Published: June 2017

Ruth Finnegan has been a major contributor to postcolonial scholarship since the early 1960s. Her book,
Oral Literature in Africa
, which was published in 1970 and revised in 2012, is a landmark achievement that has impacted on students and researchers of African oral literature for the past four decades. This book and her other publications establish the author as a visible scholar of oral literature, orality, and communication aesthetics. This entry critiques Finnegan's contributions to the study of oral literature in Africa, including the relevance of her major works to that scholarship and the orality/ writing debate.
Fourth World
Authors: Córdova Robert Vela
Published: June 2017

Though multiple definitions of the Fourth World exist, this entry will center around the contribution the term offers to Latin American studies in its Amerindian context and, in particular, to the priority of understanding the history of its textual sources. The definition of the Fourth World as a signifier for the Native Americas is established through arguments that affirm a philosophy, a political coherence, a historical continuity, and, most importantly, authoritative literary sources that corroborate each of those aspects.
Fugard, Athol
Authors: Shariati Maryam
Published: June 2017

Novelist, poet, director, and playwright, Athol Fugard is a leading contemporary dramatist. Concerned for his people and individual freedom, he is lauded as “the conscience of his country.” His familiarity with the work of European intellectuals such as Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus also finds resonance in his work. But Fugard's plays are rooted in South Africa. They offer an insight into the life of ordinary people under apartheid and deal with the ties of blood, love, and friendship. His first major play,The Blood Knot(1961) daringly used racially mixed casts and brought him international recognition. The story, similar to many of his subsequent plays, focuses on family relationships and the issue of racism in South Africa. Prominent among Fugard's dramaturgy is “Master Harold”… and the Boys(1982), which skillfully combines artistry with political statement. His most recent plays continue to receive acclaim worldwide, especially in the United States where he currently lives.
Danticat, Edwidge
Authors: Valella Daniel
Published: June 2017

A Haitian‐American writer, Edwidge Danticat (1969–) was born near Port‐au‐Prince on January 19, 1969. She is best known for her award‐winning prose fiction, almost all of which addresses themes of trauma, familial relationships, and Haitian (diasporic) identity.
Ghosh, Amitav
Authors: Iyer Nalini
Published: June 2017

Born in Calcutta, India, Amitav Ghosh (1956– ) is a novelist and essayist whose publications include seven novels, three anthologies, a travel narrative/history, and numerous essays. He has received several major awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Prix Médicis étranger, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Dan David Prize
Guillén, Nicolás
Authors: Arnedo‐Gómez Miguel
Published: June 2017

Nicolás Guillén (1902–89) was a Cuban writer who achieved notoriety with his black poetry of the 1930s. A question central to much critical work on Guillén, a mulatto, is whether he can be considered a black poet. His 1930s poetry celebrated Afro‐Cuban culture, but also seemed to hail the nationalist ideal ofmestizaje, an African–Spanish mixture. Many Afro‐Hispanist critics see him as an “authentic black poet” with a racial awareness comparable to that of black United States writers. Cuban critics, though, tend to present him as an advocate of the raceless society the Revolution claims to have achieved. With the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Guillén did become a prominent member of the revolutionary cultural establishment, and his poetry became more Marxist and less noticeably “black.” Nevertheless, some critics show how, at times, it subverts the dominant ideology of the Cuban regime.
Historiography
Authors: Yusin Jennifer
Published: June 2017

Scholars working on historiography have increasingly focused on the relationship among language, narrative, and historical consciousness. This entry briefly reviews the development of historiography from a term that means the writing of history to a concept that challenges the objectivity of the historical method, the cultural function of historical knowledge, and the role of narrative in representing past events. Additionally, the entry examines the influence of postmodern literary theories on the understanding of historiography as a discourse that is inherently problematized by itself as a form of writing. It suggests that the postmodern approach has been especially influential in shaping the recent trends in methodologies and research goals of postcolonial historiography, which looks to marginalized identity groups and the conditions of their everyday life for historical understanding. It also points to current debates surrounding the relation between historiography and historical knowledge that are influencing the directions of future research.
Hove, Chenjerai
Authors: Dodgson‐Katiyo Pauline
Published: June 2017

Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean poet, novelist, and essayist. His early poetry employs nature and corporeal imagery to represent the harshness and displacement of life in Zimbabwe. His later poetry draws on the same imagery but in a minimalist fashion. Hove's fiction, including the prizewinning novel
Bones
, centers on the lives of women. The originality of Hove's fictional language lies in his translation of Shona idiom into English to connect the past and the present. Hove's essays combine reflections on life in Zimbabwe with trenchant criticism of the abuse of power and corruption of political language in Africa.
Illiteracy in Latin America
Authors: Acosta Abraham
Published: June 2017

This entry discusses the concepts of orality and literacy in contemporary Latin American cultural, literary, and philosophical thought: orality serves as the name for indigenous, nonwritten language forms, and literacy as Western, alphabetic, language. The entry addresses the ways in which orality and literacy feature as terms that have come to define Latin American culture, both as a narrative of the originary clash between indigenous and Western civilizations as well as in its modern iteration as cultural politics used by indigenous communities to resist modernization and development. Additionally, it foregrounds key critical and theoretical problems that obtain with orality and literacy that not only complicate their current understanding, but also make possible the development of a more democratic and egalitarian vocabulary to analyze and describe indigenous speech and cultural production.
Irele, Abiola
Authors: Brown Michelle Lynn
Published: June 2017

Francis Abiola Irele, a Nigerian academic and prominent African literary and cultural critic, was born in 1936. He is best known for his seminal essays on postcolonial African identity formation at both the individual and societal levels, and on the portrayal of women in African literature. A prolific writer, Irele's analyses of African and diaspora literature, philosophy, and culture are considered to be seminal influences on Africanist and postcolonial studies. His editions of African literatures have helped to shape the contemporary African literary canon. He is currently provost of the College of Humanities, Management and Social Sciences at Kwara State University in Ilorin, Nigeria. The 2011 collection of critical essays by leading contemporary Africanist literary and cultural scholars,
Africa in the World and the World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele
, was inspired by his work.
Japanese American Internment Literature
Authors: Chua Jarrell Eiko Iu‐Hui , Chua C. L.
Published: June 2017

During World War II the United States violated the civil rights of Japanese Americans by treating them like internal colonial subjects and incarcerating them without trial in concentration camps (euphemistically termed “relocation camps”). Among Japanese American writers recording and criticizing this internment, Lawson Fusao Inada's poetry is prominent in protesting the unconstitutionality of the government's action and in exposing the similar racist and colonialist impulses and actions that caused the plight of Japanese Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans.
Johnson, Linton Kwesi
Authors: Arana Victoria
Published: June 2017

Renowned for his militant stance against British racism and police brutality, especially during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as prime minister (1979–90), Jamaican‐born Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952– ) gave his particular brand of embattled postcolonial politics the strong‐stress shape of reggae and initiated an explosion in black performance arts in Britain that is still going strong today.
Kincaid, Jamaica
Authors: James Alexander Simone A.
Published: June 2017

One of the unique and significant voices of contemporary literature, renowned novelist and critic Jamaica Kincaid is well known for her searing and unapologetic critique of patriarchy and colonialism. This entry offers an overview and brief analysis of her writing, her life, and her development as a writer.
Liberalism
Authors: Blair Peter
Published: June 2017

A political philosophy that emerged from the Enlightenment, liberalism has a complex relationship with democracy, colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization, and literature. Democracy has been shaped by a tension between “classical liberalism,” which prioritizes liberty, and “modern liberalism,” which emphasizes equality. Liberalism also molded the informal empire of free trade, and the “liberal imperialism” that devised a “civilizing mission” to justify formal empire. The development of liberalism has been vital in the Anglophone settler colonies, particularly the United States; often, especially in South Africa, it has been focused on racial justice. The neoliberalism that emerged in the late twentieth century advocates the globalization of unfettered capitalism and personal liberty. Many postcolonialists consider neoliberalism a reprise of liberal imperialism, with “human rights” replacing the “civilizing mission” as a cultural‐imperialist pretext for economic exploitation.
Latin American Literature of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Sánchez Prado Ignacio M.
Published: June 2017

This entry focuses on the role of Latin American literature of the twentieth century in shaping a postcolonial thinking in the region. It discusses an intellectual genealogy of literary thought in the region's decolonization, and then proceeds to discuss the legacies of
modernismo
, poetry, fiction, and other trends and genres.
Maathai, Wangari
Authors: Clemens Colleen Lutz
Published: June 2017

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) led a life of activism that inspired a people's movement on the African continent. A trailblazer for women's and environmental rights, Maathai was the first African woman to win a Nobel Prize, having won the 2004 Peace Prize for her development of the Green Belt Movement. One of the founding mothers of ecofeminism, Maathai's legacy is her work to show the connections between human rights, women's rights, and environmental rights.
Marginality
Authors: Nabizadeh Golnar
Published: June 2017

Marginality is a metaphor used to describe the state of being on the periphery of a cultural “center,” where the latter is usually constituted as the primary domain of power. A multifaceted concept, marginality is often associated with colonized cultures, disenfranchised subjectivities, or in terms of literature, works that reside outside the canon of Western literature. In contemporary critical theory, debates about marginality have expanded the dyadic relationship between margin and center by considering the role of ambivalence, as well as what it meant to speak “from the margins.”
Markandaya, Kamala
Authors: Thomas Mirosh
Published: June 2017

Kamala Markandaya is one of the best known first generation Indian writers writing in English. She is known for her social commitment in her works, and Markandaya herself acknowledges her works as “the literature of concern.” Most of her novels are set in India and portray the changing social situations in India, the struggles of the peasant class, or the complex relationship between Indians and the British. Markandaya is also known as a pioneer diaspora writer since she spent most of her life in Britain and wrote several novels about the plight of Indian immigrants there. Some of her best known novels are
Nectar in a Sieve
,
Some Inner Fury
,
A Handful of Rice
, and
The Nowhere Man
.
Marson, Una
Authors: Donnell Alison
Published: June 2017

Although Una Marson has been claimed as “the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in the West Indies,” she has remained a marginal figure within literary histories. Her plays are unpublished and the mixed bag of devotional sonnets, love lyrics, feminist parodies, Afro‐blues and folk monologues that comprise her poetry volumes struggle to be identified with the clean, sharp edges of Caribbean nationalist writings or the neat frames of feminist criticism. This entry offers a summary of her achievements.
Marxism in Latin America
Authors: Cerrato Maddalena
Published: June 2017

Marxism in Latin American political thought neither identifies a uniform current nor a whole philosophical perspective to which one can refer various theories. To understand the diversity of Marxist thought in Latin America, it is not a matter of outlining some general features in order to try to reduce the multiplicity of different theoretical positions to a sort of a cohesive unity. It is, instead, a matter of mapping, conceptually and chronologically, a territory of political thought in which a certain number of Latin American thinkers – who have inflected or used the ideas of Marx and Engels, but also of Lenin and Stalin, and then Gramsci and Althusser, in very different ways – had situated themselves and confronted each other.
Mukherjee, Bharati
Authors: Iyer Nalini
Published: June 2017

This entry provides biographical information about the writer Bharati Mukherjee and also outlines the significance of Mukherjee's work within South Asian diasporic writing. It looks at the controversies surrounding her, including criticism that her work is excessively assimilationist and does not pay adequate attention to the intersections of race, class, and gender when portraying diasporic subject formation.
Nehru, Jawaharlal
Authors: Ratti Manav
Published: June 2017

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) served as the first prime minister of India after the country gained independence from British colonial rule, and was a key figure in the Indian independence movement. Nehru's key policies included secularism, democratic socialism, and nonalignment. He was the father of Indira Gandhi, who served as the third prime minister of India (1966–77, 1980–84), and the maternal grandfather of Rajiv Gandhi, who served as the sixth prime minister (1984–89). Nehru's policies were committed to building an India that would be a unified, secular, and socialist republic supported by a parliamentary democracy. Nehru established a state‐controlled, planned economy that regulated industrialization and the growth of domestic industries, sheltering them from foreign competition and ensuring equality across regions. He was committed to state secularism, ensuring that India's full diversity of religious groups felt accommodated and protected by the state, for the sake of national unity.
Okri, Ben
Authors: Green‐Simms Lindsey
Published: June 2017

Ben Okri (OBE), born on March 15, 1959 in Minna, central Nigeria, is a novelist, poet, and essayist known for his “magical realist” style. Okri published his first novel,
Flowers and Shadows
(1980) at the age of 21 and is most famous for his Booker Prize‐winning novel
The Famished Road
(1991), which focuses on a spirit child (or
abiku
) who shuffles back and forth between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
p'Bitek, Okot
Authors: Todorovic Ivana
Published: June 2017

This entry provides basic information about the life and major works of the renowned Ugandan poet, novelist, anthropologist, and social critic, Okot p'Bitek. After a short biographical note, p'Bitek's most influential works and central themes are elaborated on, with special emphasis on his outlooks on African identity within a (post)colonial context. He is recognized as one of the principal African voices of the 1960s.