This book represents a shift in postcolonial literary criticism by bridging postcolonial studies in Britain with the wider postcolonial world through the concept of 'the postcolonial country', a term which collectively represents the English countryside and Britain as nation, but also rural spaces all across the ex-colonies. Drawing on a range of contemporary writers as diverse as W.G. Sebald, V.S. Naipaul, David Dabydeen, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh and Jamaica Kincaid, The Postcolonial Country in Contemporary Literature assesses the contemporary legacies of the vast rural networks of empire that once connected rural England to the hinterlands of the British colonies. This book argues that these legacies manifest themselves as a celebration of Britain's rural heritage industry in the 1980s on the one hand, and on the other, they also contribute to the persistent and exploitative processes of neocolonial globalization in the postcolonial countryside.

By situating a range of contemporary literary texts against the backdrop of the legacies of a vast rural network of empire, this book collectively critiques not only the rural heritage industry of the 1980s in Britain but also the effect of neocolonial globalisation on postcolonial rural spaces.