The issues of colonialism and imperialism have recently come to the forefront of thinking in the humanities. Disciplines such as history, literature and anthropology are taking stock of their extensive and usually unacknowledged legacy of Empire. At the same time, contemporary cultural theory has had to respond to post-colonial pressure, with its different registers and agendas. This volume ranges, geographically, from Brazil to India and South Africa, from the Andes to the Caribbean and the USA. This range is matched by a breadth of historical perspectives. Central to the whole volume is a critique of the very idea of the "postcolonial" itself. Contributors include Annie Coombes, Simon During, Peter Hulme, Neil Lazarus, David Lloyd, Anne McClintock, Zita Nunes, Benita Parry, Graham Pechey, Mary Louise Pratt, Renato Rosaldo and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

First Published in 2002. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. The present selection of papers, made from nearly two hundred published, represents in some measure the diversity of the work at the eight Essex Sociology of Literature Conferences.

First Published in 2002. Modes and categories inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. The present selection of papers, made from nearly two hundred published, represents in some measure the diversity of the work at the eight Essex Sociology of Literature Conferences.

In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, published in 1998, an international team of specialists from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, literature, art history - discusses the historical and cultural significance of western fascination with the topic of cannibalism. Addressing the image as it appears in a series of texts - popular culture, film, literature, travel writing and anthropology - the essays range from classical times to contemporary critical discourse. Cannibalism and the Colonial World examines western fascination with the figure of the cannibal and how this has impacted on the representation of the non-western world. This group of literary and anthropological scholars analyses the way cannibalism continues to exist as a term within colonial discourse and places the discussion of cannibalism in the context of postcolonial and cultural studies.

In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, an international team of specialists from a variety of disciplines discusses the historical and cultural significance of Western fascination with the topic of cannibalism. Addressing the image as it appears in a series of texts--popular culture, film, literature, travel writing and anthropology--the essays range from classical times to contemporary critical discourse. This group of literary and anthropological scholars places the discussion of cannibalism in the context of postcolonial and cultural studies.

This ambitious and immensely readable study helped establish Francis Barker's reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, . Now available in paperback with a revised preface from the author, The Tremulous Private Body studies several seventeenth-century texts to document the birth of the modern, self-possessed subject and the consequent waning of the modern body. Francis Barker draws on the theoretical work of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan and the Marxism of Louis Althusser to interpret the works of Pepys, Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, Marvell, and Rembrandt. The Tremulous Private Body engages the central themes of postmodernism--discourse, sexuality, textuality, and power--but it is not a poststructuralist work, rejecting many of the positions characteristic of poststructuralism, particularly its tendency to depoliticize discourse. The book's intense and challenging style weaves together its contemporary theoretical preoccupations and its reflection on historical material into a single, penetrating analysis of the structure of modern culture. It suggests how discourse today is complicit in the wider forms of dominance that define our world.