bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Speculative Fiction
Authors: Leggatt Judith
Published: August 2017

The dividing lines between fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction are fluid. One way to distinguish between them is to say that science fiction speculates about the future, or scientific and social progress, or life on other planets, while fantasy speculates about mythic realms. Speculative fiction is most widely used as a blanket term that covers not only fantasy and science fiction, but also alternative histories – which speculate about the repercussions of a single change in our historical time line – and magic realism – which speculates about mythic realms as fantasy does, but which does not distinguish between fantastic and realist elements within a single work. While speculative fiction is usually associated with England and the United States, works in the genre were written in the “settler colonies” of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as early as the late nineteenth century. All three countries, especially Canada, have continued to make significant contributions to the genre throughout the twentieth century, and writers from South Asia, the Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, Africa added important voices and new directions to the genre in the latter part of the century.
Feminism and Fiction
Authors: Miller Katherine
Published: August 2017

The ideals of feminism – political, economic, and social equality between men and women – have existed since Mary Wollstonecraft'sA Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792). Seeking the enfranchisement of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, first‐wave feminists fought for political equality. In mid‐century, Simone de Beauvoir'sThe Second Sex(1949, trans. 1952) questioned the gender distinctions that left women second‐class citizens.
Fictional Responses to Canonical
E
nglish Narratives
Authors: Thieme John
Published: August 2017

Numerous novels and short stories from around the globe engage in dialogues with canonical English narratives. Prominent among these are responses to texts such as
The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness
, and
Othello
that have been seen as particularly concerned with colonialism and “race.” However, the range of canonical English narratives that have generated such dialogues extends far beyond works that are overtly about imperialism. Nineteenth‐century novelists such as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Charles Dickens have also elicited numerous responses; early twentieth‐century fiction that has prompted reactions from writers from very different backgrounds includes work by Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, and Daphne du Maurier.
F
indley,
T
imothy
Authors: York Lorraine
Published: August 2017

When Timothy Findley died in 2002, several tributes quoted his self‐description as “a dedicated anti‐fascist writer and thinker” (Benson 1986). And though this was clearly true, as evinced by his fictional portraits of the terrors of Nazi ideology in novels like
The Butterfly Plague
(1969) and
Famous Last Words
(1981), Findley's label was accurate in a broader sense. His oeuvre – 10 novels, a novella, seven plays, three collections of stories, three autobiographical collections, and numerous television and radio scripts – was devoted to an exploration of the will to power and its costs. In a prose style that placed point‐blank, emphatic statement next to passages of flowing, baroque theatricality, Findley produced a fiction of dramatic statement that captured many readers. His plays, though slower to win favor with audiences, culminated in the acclaimed productions of
Elizabeth Rex
(2003a) in the last two years of his life.
F
rame,
J
anet
Authors: Evans Patrick
Published: August 2017

Janet Frame is remembered as New Zealand's most idiosyncratic writer, producing novels, short stories, a children's book, and poetry that won numerous awards and, in 2003, a shortlisting for the Nobel Prize; but she described herself, late in life, as her country's greatest unread author. In the lengthening perspective of her work since her death in January 2004, she can be seen as a writer whose life story, fleetingly implicit in her earlier work but specifically explored in later autobiographical projects, gave at least as significant an account of her times as did those more infrequent parts of her art that seemed not to refer to it. In earlier phases of her career she represented something of her generation's determined reaction to New Zealand's insular cultural nationalism. Although she never stopped criticizing this insularity in her work, in later writing she became less obviously a frustrated provincial modernist and more nearly (although not completely or only) a postmodernist writer who enjoyed playing games in fiction and poetry. In the end, she was her own brilliant work of art, renaming herself by deed poll in 1958 “Nene Janet Paterson Clutha” (after the Maori warrior Tamati Waka Nene), an artful construction for “Janet Frame” to hide behind, most particularly in her masterly three‐volume
An Autobiography
(1989).
Gilroy,Beryl
Authors: Macedo Lynne
Published: August 2017

A pioneering teacher, psychotherapist, writer, and novelist, Beryl Agatha Gilroy was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) on August 30, 1924. Her creative writing began when she was a child but, like many Caribbean writers, it was not until she moved to London in 1951 that her work was first published. Beginning with a series of groundbreaking textbooks for children and an autobiographical account of her teaching experiences in Britain, Gilroy went on to write short stories, poetry, and seven novels, all of which are characterized by her deep compassion for the underprivileged, the weak, and the oppressed.
G
ordimer,
N
adine
Authors: Smith Rowland
Published: August 2017

Nadine Gordimer is a Nobel Prize‐winner and a preeminent intellectual figure in her native South Africa. Known as a writer of novels and short stories, she became increasingly important as a commentator on South African affairs through internationally published essays and articles during the period of white‐controlled rule and the period of change following the release of Nelson Mandela and the election of a non‐racial government.
G
renville,
K
ate
Authors: Kossew Sue
Published: August 2017

Kate Grenville has, since her earliest publication in 1984 (the short story collection
Bearded Ladies)
, become one of Australia's best‐known fiction writers nationally and internationally. She has published six novels, the two most recent of which have won major international prizes. After her first Gothic novella set in Italy,
Dreamhouse
(1987), her work has explored an evolving sense of being Australian. Her novels frequently challenge the epic ideals of what she has termed the “heroic parched outback,” subverting the version of Australian history that has privileged the typically male hero battling against the odds. This subversion often takes the form of a strong feminist theme that runs through her novels, in opposition to Australian masculinist national discourses. As a teacher of creative writing herself who has written and co‐written books about the writing process, her novels have been somewhat experimental in form, often employing satire, irony, and competing points of view to create multidimensional narratives.
H
ead,
B
essie
Authors: Ibrahim Huma
Published: August 2017

Over two decades after her death, Bessie Head's four novels, two histories, and one short story collection continue to be excavated for further levels of meaning by scholars both in her native South Africa and internationally. As an African woman writer and a feminist, Head has caught the imagination of readers both in and out of the academy, prompting discussions of her feminist inclinations and her deep concern with questions of gender and race in South Africa.
H
eath,
R
oy
Authors: Akoma Chiji
Published: August 2017

Roy Heath is one of the major chroniclers of twentieth‐century Guyanese society in fiction. His novels reveal self‐absorbed protagonists imbued with a capacity to strive, sometimes with baffling histrionics, in the face of their predicaments. The social and economic forces that shape their world are subordinated to Heath's enduring interest in plumbing his characters' insecurities, fears, and ill‐defined ambitions.
H
erbert,
X
avier
Authors: De Groen Fran
Published: August 2017

Xavier Herbert's reputation rests, not without controversy, on the vitality and intensity of his entropic vision of Australia's impaired promise. His most successful works,
Capricornia
(1938), winner of the Sesquicentenary Novel Prize, and
Poor Fellow My Country
(1975), a Miles Franklin Award‐winner, offer ironic revisions of the nineteenth‐century pioneer saga that celebrated white settlement of the continent. Both revel in the richly comic (and tragic) eccentricities of their crowded multicultural cast of outback characters and seek to reconcile popular modes of melodrama and romance with serious polemical purposes.
Historical Fiction
Authors: Ball John Clement
Published: August 2017

Historical fiction, and especially the historical novel, is a prominent genre of twentieth‐century world literature whose appeal among writers and readers shows no signs of waning in the twenty‐first. Its origins in English‐language literature are commonly identified with the early nineteenth‐century historical novels of Sir Walter Scott on one side of the Atlantic and James Fenimore Cooper on the other. In the twentieth century, particularly in nations with histories of colonial invasion and administration, of displacement and resettlement, of resistance and decolonization, writers' imaginative engagement with the often traumatic and unsettling past has been important to the development of national identity and collective self‐understanding. Frequently set during periods of significant political, social, and cultural change or crisis – for instance, first contact between indigenous and European peoples, anti‐colonial or slave rebellions, civil and world wars, transition to self‐rule – historical fiction from the postcolonial world traces the effects of these public events on the fortunes of fictional characters conceived of as typical of their time and place; it may also include representations of historical personages, whether under their real names or allegorically transformed and reconstituted.
H
odgins,
J
ack
Authors: Morra Linda M.
Published: August 2017

Canadian writer Jack Hodgins evokes the local and the regional in his fiction; however, many of his characters are wanderers whose restlessness is curbed only by their return home to Vancouver Island, where most of his fiction is set, and their reconciliation with those left behind. Sometimes that return is fraught with apprehension, impeded by the distance generated by time, space, and conflict, but his protagonists often learn to connect with others again by revivifying collective memory and shared experiences. Hodgins thus attempts to strike a balance (and explore the tensions) between the cosmopolitan and the local. Although he specializes in conventional literary forms – the realist novel and short story – his characters are compelling, comic, and at times downright eccentric.
J
oshi,
A
run
Authors: Dhawan R. K.
Published: August 2017

Arun Joshi is one of the most significant Indian English novelists of the late twentieth century. While he wrote only five novels and a dozen short stories, the complexity of thought and the depth of the issues his work explores have intrigued modern readers and scholars alike. For Joshi, fiction is neither a source of entertainment nor an instrument for publicizing a set of ideas. As a writer, he addresses alienation and the labyrinth of life; his fictional world reveals man confronted by the self and the inscrutable questions of his existence. The kernel of Joshi's vision is an awareness of human rootlessness and the anxiety that results.
K
ing,
T
homas
Authors: Andrews Jennifer
Published: August 2017

Thomas King is a versatile writer who explores the complexities of being Native and Canadian in his novels, short stories, essays, and children's books. Each of King's novels centers on a Native North American community, humorously examining the relationships among multiple generations of Aboriginals and, on occasion, their interactions with non‐Natives, who often perpetuate absurd stereotypes about Indigenous peoples.
Lamming,George
Authors: Nair Supriya M.
Published: August 2017

Barbadian George Lamming is one of the intellectual heavyweights of a formidable group of Caribbean writers and intellectuals that includes C. L. R. James, Wilson Harris, and V. S. Naipaul. Like most of them, he left for London in 1950 in what became a historic postwar migration from former British colonies of the English‐speaking Caribbean. Lamming was among the first of this generation to raise issues and questions that resonate not just for the Caribbean but also for postcolonial literature and theory in general. In an early collection of essays,The Pleasures of Exile(1960a), he reinterpreted Shakespeare's infamous savage, Caliban fromThe Tempest, as a demonized but heroic figure of anti‐colonial resistance, and Prospero as the usurping imperialist who enslaved him and colonized his island. Lamming's essays go on to explore the role of literature and the writer in politics, the pathos and privilege of exile, the ideological impact of colonial education, the alienation of the migrant intellectual, the significance of proletarian and peasant movements, the problems of ethnic strife in a multicultural society, and the embattled project of nation building in the devastating aftermath of colonial settlement, slavery, and indenture in the Caribbean.
L
aurence,
M
argaret
Authors: Riegel Christian
Published: August 2017

Margaret Laurence was one of the most loved novelists of her generation. She wrote, proudly, in the Canadian idiom, and she wrote of a smalltown experience that was specifically Manitoban but also applied generally to the whole nation. Her four Canadian novels and one short story cycle continue to be mainstays of Canadian literature, while her African works of fiction and non‐fiction are considered important contributions to the understanding of colonial experience in Africa in the 1950s. She was a noted stylist who also managed to convey complex political concerns subtly. In her Canadian fiction, she was interested in the place of women in mid‐century Canada, in how the social focus in the nation was shifting from a rural and small‐town experience to an urban one, and more generally in the changes in Canada's socio‐cultural fabric that occurred leading up to and following the nation's 1967 centenary. Her characters live in the fictional world of Manawaka, a town modeled on Neepawa, Manitoba, but they also migrate to Vancouver and Toronto, as well to London, England and rural Ontario, giving her social insights broad application.
L
eacock,
S
tephen
Authors: Lynch Gerald
Published: August 2017

Stephen Leacock was the English‐speaking world's best‐known writer of humorous fiction from 1910, the year he self‐published
Literary Lapses
, until his death in 1944. He spent his working life as a professor of political economy at McGill University in Montreal, publishing widely in his discipline as well as in history, biography, literary criticism, and travel. But it is as a writer of comic fictions that Leacock came to international attention. And though the book of miscellaneous sketches was his preferred form, Leacock's best fiction comprised the two short story cycles
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
(1912) and
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
(1914).
L
im,
S
uchen
C
hristine
Authors: Eustace John
Published: August 2017

Suchen Christine Lim is a prominent Singaporean writer whose fiction negotiates the complex cultural and social milieus of Malaysia and Singapore. Though she was the inaugural winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in 1992 for the third of her four novels,
Fistful of Colours
(1993), she continues to receive rather sparse critical attention outside of the Malay archipelago. This critical neglect is most probably due to the relative marginality of Singapore and Malaysia in the ambit of postcolonial literary studies rather than to any defect in Lim's style. Indeed, her engagement with the colonial and contemporary histories of Malaysia and Singapore – with the cultural exchanges and tensions between the countries' Malay, Chinese, and Indian populations, and with gender relations within and between these cultural constituencies – make her fiction ideal fodder for critical scrutiny.
M
alouf,
D
avid
Authors: Randall Don
Published: August 2017

David Malouf, born in Brisbane on March 20, 1934 to parents of Lebanese and English heritage, began his literary career as a poet in the early 1960s, eventually gaining high‐profile recognition in the Australian literary and critical community with
Neighbours in a Thicket
(1974). Since 1975, Malouf has increasingly applied himself to the writing of prose fiction, winning international recognition with his second novel,
An Imaginary Life
(1978), before consolidating his status as a major anglophone author with his very successful sixth and seventh novels,
The Great World
(1990) and
Remembering Babylon
(1993).
Maniam,K. S.
Authors: Ng Andrew Hock Soon
Published: August 2017

K. S. Maniam, born Subramaniam Krishnan Maniam, is Malaysia's most prolific anglophone writer. His oeuvre includes three novels, five collections of short stories, and two plays. Maniam was born in 1942 in Bedong, a small town in the state of Kedah, to a Tamil Hindu migrant family. His childhood is evocatively captured in his first novelThe Return(1981), which resonantly evokes the drudgery of poverty, the everyday rituals and symbology of Hinduism that infuse his community's identity, and the dilemma of diaspora. After completing his secondary schooling, Maniam worked as a student teacher before studying in England on a scholarship, receiving his Certificate of Education in 1964. Returning to Malaya, he taught in secondary schools in Kedah for several years before pursuing further education at the University of Malaya. There, he earned bachelor's (1973) and master's (1979) degrees, continuing as an English Department faculty member until his retirement in 1997.
Mansfield,Katherine
Authors: New William
Published: August 2017

Wellington‐born, Katherine Mansfield published her major short stories in England, but her earliest sketches appeared in school magazines and small Australian periodicals. Praised and derided during her lifetime, she came to be recognized as New Zealand's foremost writer historically, and as one of the world's most influential, formally innovative English‐language authors of short fiction – adept at crafting character, dialogue, time, symbol, and scene. Most of her stories, regularly represented in modernist and survey anthologies, have remained in print since their first publication.
M
aracle,
L
ee
Authors: Suzack Cheryl
Published: August 2017

Lee Maracle burst onto the Canadian literary scene with her autobiographical novel
Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel
(1975), and she continues to be an important political and literary voice. Her work transcends geographical and historical boundaries to express the plight of Indigenous women and children, the histories of colonialism and struggles for decolonization by Indigenous communities, and the spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities of her Salish ancestry. Maracle's writing is often polemical, using character development and plot to engage directly with her reader's assumptions about Indigenous peoples’ experiences of racism and colonialism, yet her work is also enlivened by the core tenets of orality and transformation that inhere in Indigenous storytelling traditions. Through the integration of political, aesthetic, and spiritual elements, her writing expresses the force and value of literary sovereignty by demonstrating how an Indigenous worldview integrates self, family, community, and culture to decolonizing ends. Her writing is importantly situated alongside that of a generation of Canadian authors, including Jeannette Armstrong, Beth Brant, Maria Campbell, and Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, who have refashioned Indigenous writing in order to formalize and define their activist aesthetics and politics.
M
ittelholzer,
E
dgar
Authors: James Louis
Published: August 2017

Edgar Mittelholzer was the first Caribbean émigré to enter Britain to become a professional novelist. Never a “literary” writer, although outspoken and obsessed with his craft, his novels were written to sell and to entertain. His fiction was not the first to explore the history, topography, and social tensions of the Caribbean, but its diversity and volume make him a significant pioneer in the literary history of the region.
M
oorhouse,
F
rank
Authors: Bennett Bruce
Published: August 2017

Frank Moorhouse is an Australian chronicler and storyteller whose country‐bred insights into place and community made him an ironic observer of city life in a new age of “liberation” from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Moorhouse's coinage of “discontinuous fiction” for his books of loosely linked stories, fragments, headlines, and notices avoids the self‐conscious effects of some postmodernists while employing their techniques. An early training in country town and city fringe journalism provided Moorhouse with disciplines of Hemingwayesque brevity. In the 1990s he began an extended historical trilogy of novels about individuals caught up in the intrigues of the interwar League of Nations.
Mukherjee,Bharati
Authors: Banerjee Mita
Published: August 2017

Bharati Mukherjee is an American writer of Indian origin whose work combines a highly ironic, understated prose style with recurring postcolonial motifs such as the impossibility of return, the ambivalence of cultural hybridity, and the power that can be born out of the pain of cultural uprootedness.
N
aipaul,
V. S.
Authors: Dooley Gillian
Published: August 2017

Having devoted his life to writing, V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He has brought his uncompromising gaze to bear upon many, often neglected, parts of the world, combining a steely vision with a capacity for compassion that does not sentimentalize poverty, glorify violence, or apologize for imperialism. He has resisted what he calls the corruption of causes and is proud of the fact that he has never been a spokesman for anything.
N
gũgĩ
wa T
hiong'o
Authors: Ogude James
Published: August 2017

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is one of the most influential African writers today, not only for his creative work but also for his wide‐ranging contributions on Africa's cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people has been an enduring theme in his works. As novelist, playwright, and thinker, Ngũgĩ has been concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he has also showed how narrative, specifically imaginative literature, can be an agent of history and self‐definition, an instrument for taming and naming one's environment, and has explored literature's role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and by repressive postcolonial states.
Okri,Ben
Authors: Roy Anjali Gera
Published: August 2017

Without deviating from the path paved by an earlier nationalist generation, Booker Prize‐winning Nigerian novelist, poet, and short story writer Ben Okri has given a new turn to African writing through his invention of an African magic realism. While often placed alongside magic realists such as Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, his work differs by substituting for their parodic irony and satirical cynicism an unself‐conscious respect for traditional belief systems as reflected in African myths and folktales and Amos Tutuola's novels. Celebrated by some as a literary visionary and detested by others as pseudo‐mystical, Okri combines metaphysical lyricism with scathing political analysis to communicate the bitter disillusionment of post‐Civil War Nigeria.
P
akistani Fiction
Authors: Shamsie Muneeza
Published: August 2017

There has always been a tradition of English‐language writing in Pakistan, but contemporary Pakistani English fiction is new. In 1947, when Pakistan was created by the partition of British India, its only eminent English‐language novelist was Ahmed Ali. His classic
Twilight in Delhi
(1940) portrays life in traditional Delhi against the onslaught of Westernization and provides interesting contrasts with
Sunlight on a Broken Column
(1963), a requiem for Lucknow by the Indian writer, Attia Hosain. Ali's innovative, stylized linguistic experiments foreshadow the more successful strategies of Hosain and Pakistanis Aamer Hussein and Kamila Shamsie to incorporate the literary elements of Urdu into English narrative.
Politics/Activism and Fiction
Authors: Leman Peter
Published: August 2017

In an essay entitled “Literature as Cultural Opposition,” South African novelist André Brink observes that while the “political novel … is a very specifickindof novel” in the United States and Europe, in places like South Africa where “everythinghas a political implication,” it is virtually impossible for a novel to be anything but political (1996, 186–7). Using the analogy of a sliding scale between the two extremes ofl'art pour l'artandlittérature engagée, Brink suggests that a text or author's degree of political engagement “would be determined simply by thepointon that scale where one happens to find oneself at that given moment and/or by themannerin which the tension between the two extremes on the connecting line is activated” (187). Although it is, arguably, an oversimplification, Brink's image of degrees of political engagement tied to particular temporal and political contexts is nevertheless useful for framing a discussion of the ways in which anglophone and postcolonial fiction in the twentieth century variously met with, responded to, forcefully opposed, and, at times, attempted to distance itself from the political. Brink's image does point to an immediate difficulty, however – nearly all fiction produced in postcolonial contexts is, in some sense, political or has political implications, whether deliberate or not. However, a number of works and authors stand out in their engagements with the political, and those that push toward the extremes of Brink's sliding scale most clearly demonstrate the complex potential and limitations of involving fiction in political activism or political activism in fiction.
Postcolonialism and Fiction
Authors: McLeod John
Published: August 2017

Postcolonialism is a term used to signify a large, varied, and interdisciplinary body of academic scholarship that is primarily concerned with the social and cultural impact of European colonialism and modes of resistance to it. Although “postcolonialism” might imply a coordinated or common approach by those who pursue it, the terrain of postcolonialism is much more diverse than the term might imply. There is much debate about the merits and debits of postcolonial scholarship, about whether or not postcolonialism meaningfully furthers the ongoing resistance to colonialism and its enduring political and imaginative legacies, and indeed about how to spell the term (with a hyphen, as in “postcolonialism,” or without?). To enter the field of postcolonialism is to enter a markedly contested area of academic study characterized by internal dissent, conflict, and lack of consensus.
P
richard,
K
atharine
S
usannah
Authors: Bird Delys
Published: August 2017

Katharine Susannah Prichard identified with Australia's so‐called democratic nationalist literary tradition, established by late nineteenth‐century writers such as Henry Lawson, Bernard O'Dowd, and Joseph Furphy. When her first novel,
The Pioneers
(1915), was published in London it was received rapturously in Australia as the first truly Australian novel. Prichard's output was enormous, including 13 novels, three collections of short fiction, and numerous other stories published in journals and newspapers, plus a fictionalized account of her childhood, an autobiography, two small collections of poetry, 13 plays (most unpublished), innumerable political speeches, statements, pamphlets and articles, and a polemical work,
The Real Russia
(1934), describing her state‐sponsored visit to Russia in 1933. She was also a prodigious letter writer. Her work was widely translated, especially in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries.
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction
Authors: Stobie Cheryl
Published: August 2017

Over the twentieth century there was an increasing representation of queer/alternative sexualities in world fiction, dealing with such matters as homophobia, the normativity of heterosexuality, and gender issues. This burgeoning was made possible by the globalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) studies. Latterly, representations of alternative sexualities in world fiction have highlighted the effects of colonialism on the construction of sexuality, expanded and nuanced ideas of contemporary sexuality as developed in the West, and reconstructed culturally specific sexualities.
R
eid,
V. S.
Authors: Macedo Lynne
Published: August 2017

Author, journalist, and historian, the Honourable Victor Stafford Reid was born in Kingston, Jamaica on May 1, 1913. Reid was among the first group of writers to emerge in the late 1930s when political and cultural awareness were first awakening in Jamaica, and all of his writing is marked by “that theme of struggle and resistance” (Baugh 2). Reid's fictional output included three novels for adults and four children's books, all of which demonstrate his abiding desire to reinstate pride in black culture and history. His final published work was a biography of Norman Washington Manley,
The Horses of the Morning
(1985).
R
hys,
J
ean
Authors: Savory Elaine
Published: August 2017

Jean Rhys wrote five novels and many short stories, beginning her career at the height of early modernism. Each of her texts is finely crafted down to the punctuation, and though she was once separately categorized as a modernist (in the European sense), a Caribbean writer, and a woman writer, it is now generally realized that her extraordinary skill at fiction reflects all these identities. Her life spanned the turn of the century, World Wars I and II, the Depression, the ending of the British Empire, significant immigration from former colonies into Britain, feminism, the US Civil Rights movement, and Black Power. In her fiction, she used many of these as contexts for individual experience, and mined her own experience (colonial Caribbean origin, gender, decades of poverty and struggle).
Riley,Joan
Authors: Fischer Susan Alice
Published: August 2017

Joan Riley is the author of four novels and coeditor of the anthologyLeave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Belonging(1996). She has also written poetry and plays, and some of her work has been anthologized and adapted for television and radio. Riley's work is feminist as well as deeply concerned with the struggles black and working‐class people endure in Britain and Jamaica.
R
oss,
S
inclair
Authors: Lesk Andrew
Published: August 2017

Sinclair Ross has never occupied the international literary imagination in the way fellow Canadians Alice Munro or Michael Ondaatje do; yet his ongoing significance (largely situated within university curricula) arises from his mythologizing of Canada as a malevolent north, hostile to and reflective of those who inhabit it. His rhythmic prose, located at the apex of Canadian modernism, concerns not merely the often aggressive antagonism of austere prairie conditions but also the combative intersections of gender and sexuality, and, in later efforts, violence and urban alienation, with its attendant withering of character.
S
ahgal,
N
ayantara
Authors: Guttman Anna
Published: August 2017

Nayantara Sahgal was born on May 10, 1927 in Allahabad, then in British India. At the time of Sahgal's birth, her maternal uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, was already a well‐known nationalist leader, writer, and activist. Twenty years later, he would become independent India's first prime minister. Given her family background, it should be no surprise that Sahgal's writing, both fiction and non‐fiction, demonstrates a strong interest in the Indian nation, nationalist history, and national politics. Indeed, she published two autobiographies early in her writing career –
From Fear Set Free
(1962) and
Prison and Chocolate Cake
(1966) – which document life with the first family of Indian politics and reveal her great admiration and respect for Nehru. Sahgal went on to edit the letters of Nehru and his sister Vijayalakshmi, who enjoyed a close relationship and also wrote two biographies of Indira Gandhi, her first cousin and prime minister of India from 1971 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984:
Indira Gandhi's Emergence and Style
(1978) and
Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power
(1982). Highly critical of the state of emergency declared by then Prime Minister Gandhi between 1975 and 1977, Sahgal resigned her presidency of India's national literary academy in protest and, for her outspoken views, had a promised diplomatic appointment to Italy revoked. She then lived in the United States and in Britain for a time.
S
alkey,
A
ndrew
Authors: Macedo Lynne
Published: August 2017

Andrew Salkey was a key figure among the first group of Caribbean writers to settle in London in the early 1950s. A writer, broadcaster, editor, journalist, and lecturer, Salkey was a prolific writer whose output encompassed all the literary genres, and whose awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship (1960) and the Casa de las Américas Prize (1979) for his poetry.
S
aro‐
W
iwa,
K
en
Authors: Osha Sanya
Published: August 2017

Ken Saro‐Wiwa is a Nigerian author who was hanged on November 10, 1995, along with eight compatriots from Ogoniland, under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. Although he had a lifelong commitment to literature, his environmental activism and the brutal manner of his death sometimes overshadow his contributions as a creative writer.
S
eth,
V
ikram
Authors: Davis Rocío G.
Published: August 2017

An award‐winning Indian poet and novelist educated in India, Britain, China, and the United States, Vikram Seth demonstrates the ways a transcultural sensibility may be realized not only in the content of a text, but also in its style. Born on June 20, 1952 into a middle‐class Hindu family, Seth was working on a PhD in economics at Stanford University when a course in creative writing, which illustrated how poetic form and inspiration function together, changed his career path. He began writing poetry and his two early collections,
Mappings
(1980) and
The Humble Administrator's Garden
(1985), which won the 1985 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia, reveal the perspectives and concerns that he would explore in more depth in his fiction: the cultural relationship between the East and West, the symbolic possibilities of commonplace incidents and mundane details, and a striving for technical virtuosity in diverse forms. Seth's literary experiments in cultural hybridity also include his versions of moral fables – based on folklore of India, China, Greece, Ukraine, and the imaginary “the Land of Gup” – for children in
Beastly Tales from Here and There
(1992).
S
ingh,
K
hushwant
Authors: Dhawan R. K.
Published: August 2017

Khushwant Singh's reputation as one of India's most significant novelists in English rests on his partition novel
Train to Pakistan
(1956), winner of the Grove Press India Fiction Prize. He is also a noted Sikh historian, political analyst, journalist, and translator.
S
outheast
A
sian Fiction
Authors: Ng Andrew Hock Soon
Published: August 2017

One challenge faced by a postcolonial nation is what to do with its colonial legacies. In Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Singapore have appropriated the language of the colonizers for their own socio‐cultural and nationalist ends; like India and Ireland, they have recognized English as a language of the people and promoted its flowering through literary activities and education. The situation is different in Malaysia, where policy makers in the 1970s endeavored to relegate English (and other minority‐group languages) to secondary status in a bid to strengthen the prominence of the national language, Malay.
SouthernAfrican Fiction
Authors: Booker M. Keith
Published: August 2017

Fiction by writers from Southern Africa has been an important element of postcolonial literature's rise to global prominence since the middle of the twentieth century. The special history of the Republic of South Africa has produced a longer and more overtly politicized literary tradition than those in most other African nations. However, fiction from Zimbabwe has been particularly rich as well.
S
oyinka,
W
ole
Authors: Kortenaar Neil Ten
Published: August 2017

Wole (Akinwande Oluwole) Soyinka, the first writer from Africa and the only black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1986), is the most multidimensional of the continent's writers. Dramatist, poet, novelist, literary and social critic, and memoirist – he has achieved preeminence in all genres. Soyinka combines genres in important new ways, and he is the most significant writer of dramatic verse in English in the second half of the twentieth century. His literary career has been marked by fresh beginnings and resisted prediction. His three novels are so varied as to seem almost by different hands. At the same time, there is a distinctive Soyinka voice already present in the plays and poems written as a young man and recognizable across his output, a voice characterized by erudite display, rhetorical flourish, sensuous or grotesque imagery, irreverence, and rebarbative syntax.
S
ri
L
ankan Fiction
Authors: Goonetilleke D. C. R. A.
Published: August 2017

The history of Sri Lankan (originally Ceylonese) fiction in English dates from 1917. The early works are artistically unrewarding, but novelists such as Lucien de Zilwa in
The Dice of the Gods
(1917), S. J. K. Crowther in
The Knight Errant
(1928), and H. E. Weerasooriya in
The Trousered Harijan
(1946) offer critical glimpses of the society around them. The semidocumentary, semiimaginative writings of R. L. Spittel, including
Savage Sanctuary
(1941) and
Vanished Trails
(1950), are unique: he focuses on the Veddas, an aboriginal community.
T
haroor,
S
hashi
Authors: Crane Ralph
Published: August 2017

The Indian writer Shashi Tharoor is the author of 10 books, including three novels, a collection of short fiction, and six works of non‐fiction. Despite living in the United States for most of his adult life, in his novels and his collection of early stories,
The Five‐Dollar Smile
(1990), published in response to the success of The
Great Indian Novel
(1989), Tharoor eschews such topics as identity and migration – common concerns of Indian diasporic writing – in favor of a more direct (perhaps nostalgic) engagement with India that manifests differently in each book.
U
rquhart,
J
ane
Authors: Compton Anne
Published: August 2017

Jane Urquhart is a poet and fiction writer whose landscape‐rich novels feature border crossings. Her early characters – in
The Whirlpool
(1986),
Changing Heaven
(1990), and
Away
(1993) – are situated on the permeable border between natural and supernatural. Her foundational stories are therefore romances. In
The Underpainter
(1997), which shifts to realism, life and art border one another.
The Stone Carvers
(2001) similarly occupies this border, but here art's relation to life is redemptive rather than conflictual. In
A Map of Glass
(2005), Urquhart explores mapping and language, and how each records the human excursion into nature. Actual borders – fences, perimeters, and concession lines – proliferate. Because European migration to the New World or the reverse – of Canadians to Europe, usually to battlefields – occurs in five of Urquhart's narratives, the borders are also political.
V
assanji,
M. G.
Authors: Davis Rocío G.
Published: August 2017

Author of six novels and two collections of short stories, and the only two‐time winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize for fiction, M. G. Vassanji engages themes that include multiple diasporas, interracial tension and religious intolerance, immigrant communities, history and memory, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the use of stories to link people to their past. His only non‐fiction work so far,
A Place Within: Rediscovering India
(2008), is both travelogue and history as Vassanji returns to the country of his ancestors and reflects on his family's story.
V
era,
Y
vonne
Authors: Samuelson Meg
Published: August 2017

Yvonne Vera is the most prolific and provocative black woman writer to have emerged from Zimbabwe. Her prose is evocatively lyrical, transfusing the ethical concerns of her writing into a nuanced, associative aesthetics. Vera's fiction delves into the marrow of women's embodied experiences, re‐evaluating national history through a prism that refracts both stunning beauty and excruciating pain. Within the context of Zimbabwean literature, her oeuvre can best be situated alongside Dambudzo Marechera's, in its formal experimentation and its unflinching airing of social taboos, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's
Nervous Conditions
, in its focus on the inner lives of women on the margins of war. Vera, who once said “I would like to be remembered as a writer who had no fear of words and who had an intense love of her nation” (Mutandwa 2002), received numerous accolades – including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa and the Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa – and in 2002 her novel
Butterfly Burning
(1998) was listed among “Africa's Best 100 Books of the Twentieth Century.”
W
ilson,
E
thel
Authors: Gerson Carole
Published: August 2017

Ethel Wilson's stylishly ironic novels and short stories, mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, placed Vancouver and southwestern British Columbia on the national and international literary map. Her fiction creates a tension between her intense attachment to the region's contrasting landscapes and her characters’ quests for belonging and social standing. Wilson received the Canada Council Medal in 1961, followed by the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada in 1964 and the Order of Canada in 1970. In 1985, her status as “the doyenne of British Columbia writers” (Stouck, in Wilson 1987, p. xvi) was further recognized in the establishment of British Columbia's Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Z
ameenzad,
A
dam
Authors: Shamsie Kamila
Published: August 2017

Adam Zameenzad belongs to a generation of postcolonial South Asian writers who opened up the possibilities of the anglophone novel form in the 1980s. Yet it goes against the spirit of his work to speak of it in connection to a specific region. His characters inhabit a range of nations and identities, resulting in an oeuvre that adamantly refuses to view the world through any kind of narrowing lens, preferring to seek collective truths. Stylistically, there is an exuberance and generosity to his work, even while it depicts tragedy and injustice. Both the comic and the cosmic feature strongly in his fiction, which has been published and translated widely.
Fault estimation and fault‐tolerant control of the FAST NREL 5‐MW reference wind turbine using a proportional multi‐integral observer
Authors: Kühne Patrick , Pöschke Florian , Schulte Horst
Published: August 2017

A proportional multi‐integral (PMI) observer scheme is used to reconstruct actuator and sensor faults in large‐scale wind turbines. For the nonlinear full‐load region, a PMI observer in Takagi‐Sugeno form is used. Two different methods are proposed for the observer design: a Lyapunov‐based and a modified linear quadratic regulator approach, where the stability is ensured by a negative derivative of the Lyapunov function candidate. The actuator and sensor faults are directly reconstructed from an augmented state‐space vector. The control inputs and measurement signal are then modified with the reconstructed fault signals to achieve fault‐tolerant control in the presence of faults with a similar behavior to the fault‐free case. It is shown by extensive simulation studies that the PMI observer is able the reconstruct offset and ramp‐shaped faults with high accuracy. The performance of the fault reconstruction and fault‐tolerant control scheme based on a 4‐degree‐of‐freedom observer model is tested in simulations by a high‐order 24‐degree‐of‐freedom model with the aeroelastic code FAST by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The new results are also compared with those of the previously published fault reconstruction scheme using Takagi‐Sugeno sliding‐mode observers.
Protochromic Devices from a Cephalopod Structural Protein
Authors: Ordinario David D. , Leung Erica M. , Phan Long , Kautz Rylan , Lee Woo Kyung , Naeim Mahan , Kerr Justin P. , Aquino Mercedeez J. , Sheehan Paul E. , Gorodetsky Alon A.
Published: August 2017

Cephalopods possess remarkable camouflage capabilities, which are enabled by their complex innervated skin architectures and advanced nervous systems. As such, cephalopod skin constitutes an exciting model for biomimetic camouflage technologies. This study draws inspiration from the constituent components of optically active ultrastructures found in squid skin cells to help design color‐changing bioelectronic devices, which consist of a proton‐transporting active layer contacted by a proton‐conducting actuating electrode. The devices exhibit distinct shifts in their reflectance and coloration, which are attributed to active layer thickness changes induced by the direct electrical injection/extraction of protons. The reported findings may hold relevance for developing novel color‐changing technologies, understanding ion‐transporting biological systems, and engineering improved bioelectronic platforms.
Gold‐Catalyzed Synthesis of Dibenzo[1,5]diazocines from β‐(2‐Aminophenyl)‐α,β‐ynones
Authors: Rode Navnath D. , Arcadi Antonio , Chiarini Marco , Marinelli Fabio , Portalone Gustavo
Published: August 2017

β‐(2‐Aminophenyl)‐α,β‐ynones afforded exclusively challenging dibenzo[1,5]diazocines by means of (JonPhosAuNCMe)SbF6 catalysis. In contrast with the known gold‐catalyzed reaction path of 2‐alkynylanilines that leads to indoles, ynones underwent an auto intermolecular hydroamination. This process resulted finally in the formation of an eight‐membered ring, likely through a selective 8‐exo‐dig intramolecular hydroamination that prevailed over the possible cyclocondensation reaction (that would result in the formation of 4‐aminoquinoline derivatives). The easy availability of β‐(2‐aminophenyl)‐α,β‐ynones and the simple cyclization procedure make this approach suitable for the preparation of a wide range of useful dibenzodiazocines. The methodology can be extended to the use of β‐(2‐aminophenyl)‐α,β‐ynoates as substrates.

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