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Books by John Thieme
Bloomsbury, 2023
Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change,... more Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet. Focusing on fiction set in the ‘long present’ – a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present – Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat. Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Available:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350296060&st=Thieme&fbclid=IwAR1vWSFMv3wlBEnIG6yp15M39gWsPLIpXpGGokvtyoFno0_vyy7F9moRtiM
Setu Publications, 2023
COVER BLURB Personal and public, serious and playful, John Thieme’s second volume of collected po... more COVER BLURB
Personal and public, serious and playful, John Thieme’s second volume of collected poems, Digitalis, takes a speculative look at many of the most urgent issues facing the world today. Its first part employs an eclectic array of forms to illuminate a broad range of pressing topics in poems that are linked by their concern with the contemporary predicament and the part poetry can play in making sense of it. Prominent among its themes are anthropogenic climate change and a sense of life lived in a perennial state of suspense. Its second part, ‘Massiah’, is a sequence of verse tales, told in a Guyanese barber’s shop, which move between comedy, pathos and a sense of existential threat. These poems are built around the belief that storytelling forges a sustaining notion of community and the listeners in the barber’s play a vital role in the completion of the storytelling moment, as they question, probe and react to the tales being told. The tales move between an account of Columbus’s visit to Guyana, on a fifth voyage to the Americas, which, if the received historical record is to be believed, he never made, and scurrilous accounts of more recent events, in which gossip and hearsay crystallize into urban myths. In both parts memory and invention jostle for primacy, as do pessimism and hope. Throughout the collection, the originality of John Thieme’s verse destabilizes expectations, encouraging us to question conventional perceptions about climate, history, language and more or less everything else that we take for granted.
The poems 'Digitalis' and 'A Barber's Tale, which open the two Parts of the collection have been uploaded here.
Postcolonial Literary Geographies, Chapter 1, 2016
The pre-publication text of the introductory chapter to my book, Postcolonial Literary Geographie... more The pre-publication text of the introductory chapter to my book, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, which includes chapters on postcolonial mappae mundi, botany and botanical tropes, spice, postcolonial ecologies, representations of animals and therianthropes, and cities (London and Mumbai/Bombay).
A chapbook that brings together 30 of my poems. The title-poem and three previously unpublished p... more A chapbook that brings together 30 of my poems. The title-poem and three previously unpublished poems are here on academia. The Foreword and more information on the volume are available on Amazon.
Postcolonial Literary Geographies examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed ... more Postcolonial Literary Geographies examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It considers the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography. Individual chapters deal with cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, and the book also considers the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Preview extracts are available on Amazon -- see below.
This is an overview of responses to literary texts overtly associated with the colonial project o... more This is an overview of responses to literary texts overtly associated with the colonial project or the construction of "race" (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and Othello), as well as to texts where the interaction between culture and imperialism is less obvious (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The postcolonial con-texts are located within their social and cultural backgrounds, and the different forms their responses take to their pre-texts are explored. The book argues that "writing back" operates along a continuum between complicity and oppositionality; and also suggests that poco appropriations of canonical pre-texts frequently generate re-readings of their "originals". It concludes by considering the implications of this argument for discussions of identity politics and literary genealogies more generally.
R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-exami... more R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of authentic Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan's writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan's imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer. The pre-publication text of the opening chapter on the Contexts and Intertexts of Narayan's is available here.
A comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most rece... more A comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts - Caribbean, European and other - which have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for those coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time. It also offers a re-reading of his writing, which particularly emphasises strategies he has used to dismantle Manichean models of culture and society and his focus is on a travelling Odyssean protagonist who transgresses binary geographical divisions. Walcott's unpublished and out-of-print drama is discussed along with better-known plays such as "Dream on Monkey Mountain", "The Joker of Seville" and "Pantomime"; and the study incudes close readings of some of his best-known poems.
This volume explores the relationship between ecology and literature thanks to the contributions ... more This volume explores the relationship between ecology and literature thanks to the contributions of renowned international and national scholars. The environmental issue and the various forms of relation between human beings and non-human nature are investigated through critical analyses of literary works from Australia to Canada, from the Caribbean and United States to Great Britain. In line with the biocultural partnership paradigm developed by Riane Eisler and central to the work of the Partnership Studies Group founded at the University of Udine, the essays gathered in this book aim at challenging the binary thinking that separates humans from nature while fostering more dialogical interactions and, at the same time, stimulating in the reader a deeper environmental awareness.
An alphabetically arranged glossary of post-colonial topics, theory, writers, artists and events.... more An alphabetically arranged glossary of post-colonial topics, theory, writers, artists and events.
Four specimen entries now added: On George Lamming; Manichean Allegory, the Morant Bay Rebellion and Partition.
The Table of Contents is now attached.
Papers by John Thieme
Southeast Asian Review of English, Dec 30, 2016
‘After the Bounty: Botany and Botanical Tropes in Caribbean Writing’, in Re/membering Place, ed. Catherine Delmas and André Dodeman, Bern: Peter Lang, 2013:, 2013
![Research paper thumbnail of Moraes, Dominic Francis [Dom] (1938–2004), poet and writer](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/69836818/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Southeast Asian Review of English
Bloomsbury, 2023
Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change,... more Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet. Focusing on fiction set in the ‘long present’ – a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present – Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat. Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Available:
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350296060&st=Thieme&fbclid=IwAR1vWSFMv3wlBEnIG6yp15M39gWsPLIpXpGGokvtyoFno0_vyy7F9moRtiM
Setu Publications, 2023
COVER BLURB Personal and public, serious and playful, John Thieme’s second volume of collected po... more COVER BLURB
Personal and public, serious and playful, John Thieme’s second volume of collected poems, Digitalis, takes a speculative look at many of the most urgent issues facing the world today. Its first part employs an eclectic array of forms to illuminate a broad range of pressing topics in poems that are linked by their concern with the contemporary predicament and the part poetry can play in making sense of it. Prominent among its themes are anthropogenic climate change and a sense of life lived in a perennial state of suspense. Its second part, ‘Massiah’, is a sequence of verse tales, told in a Guyanese barber’s shop, which move between comedy, pathos and a sense of existential threat. These poems are built around the belief that storytelling forges a sustaining notion of community and the listeners in the barber’s play a vital role in the completion of the storytelling moment, as they question, probe and react to the tales being told. The tales move between an account of Columbus’s visit to Guyana, on a fifth voyage to the Americas, which, if the received historical record is to be believed, he never made, and scurrilous accounts of more recent events, in which gossip and hearsay crystallize into urban myths. In both parts memory and invention jostle for primacy, as do pessimism and hope. Throughout the collection, the originality of John Thieme’s verse destabilizes expectations, encouraging us to question conventional perceptions about climate, history, language and more or less everything else that we take for granted.
The poems 'Digitalis' and 'A Barber's Tale, which open the two Parts of the collection have been uploaded here.
Postcolonial Literary Geographies, Chapter 1, 2016
The pre-publication text of the introductory chapter to my book, Postcolonial Literary Geographie... more The pre-publication text of the introductory chapter to my book, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, which includes chapters on postcolonial mappae mundi, botany and botanical tropes, spice, postcolonial ecologies, representations of animals and therianthropes, and cities (London and Mumbai/Bombay).
A chapbook that brings together 30 of my poems. The title-poem and three previously unpublished p... more A chapbook that brings together 30 of my poems. The title-poem and three previously unpublished poems are here on academia. The Foreword and more information on the volume are available on Amazon.
Postcolonial Literary Geographies examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed ... more Postcolonial Literary Geographies examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It considers the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography. Individual chapters deal with cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, and the book also considers the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Preview extracts are available on Amazon -- see below.
This is an overview of responses to literary texts overtly associated with the colonial project o... more This is an overview of responses to literary texts overtly associated with the colonial project or the construction of "race" (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and Othello), as well as to texts where the interaction between culture and imperialism is less obvious (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The postcolonial con-texts are located within their social and cultural backgrounds, and the different forms their responses take to their pre-texts are explored. The book argues that "writing back" operates along a continuum between complicity and oppositionality; and also suggests that poco appropriations of canonical pre-texts frequently generate re-readings of their "originals". It concludes by considering the implications of this argument for discussions of identity politics and literary genealogies more generally.
R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-exami... more R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of authentic Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan's writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan's imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer. The pre-publication text of the opening chapter on the Contexts and Intertexts of Narayan's is available here.
A comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most rece... more A comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts - Caribbean, European and other - which have shaped him as a writer. The book contains a broad overview of Walcott's career for those coming to the work of the 1992 Nobel Laureate for the first time. It also offers a re-reading of his writing, which particularly emphasises strategies he has used to dismantle Manichean models of culture and society and his focus is on a travelling Odyssean protagonist who transgresses binary geographical divisions. Walcott's unpublished and out-of-print drama is discussed along with better-known plays such as "Dream on Monkey Mountain", "The Joker of Seville" and "Pantomime"; and the study incudes close readings of some of his best-known poems.
This volume explores the relationship between ecology and literature thanks to the contributions ... more This volume explores the relationship between ecology and literature thanks to the contributions of renowned international and national scholars. The environmental issue and the various forms of relation between human beings and non-human nature are investigated through critical analyses of literary works from Australia to Canada, from the Caribbean and United States to Great Britain. In line with the biocultural partnership paradigm developed by Riane Eisler and central to the work of the Partnership Studies Group founded at the University of Udine, the essays gathered in this book aim at challenging the binary thinking that separates humans from nature while fostering more dialogical interactions and, at the same time, stimulating in the reader a deeper environmental awareness.
An alphabetically arranged glossary of post-colonial topics, theory, writers, artists and events.... more An alphabetically arranged glossary of post-colonial topics, theory, writers, artists and events.
Four specimen entries now added: On George Lamming; Manichean Allegory, the Morant Bay Rebellion and Partition.
The Table of Contents is now attached.
Southeast Asian Review of English, Dec 30, 2016
‘After the Bounty: Botany and Botanical Tropes in Caribbean Writing’, in Re/membering Place, ed. Catherine Delmas and André Dodeman, Bern: Peter Lang, 2013:, 2013
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Southeast Asian Review of English
Margins, Aug 6, 2014
Writing Region: Robert Kroetsch and the Poetics of Prairie Space (John Thieme) Abstract This ... more Writing Region: Robert Kroetsch and the Poetics of Prairie Space (John Thieme)
Abstract
This article considers the problematics of writing region with a particular focus on the formal strategies employed to represent Prairie space in four novels by the Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch. It locates Kroetsch’s work in relation to the fiction of his Western Canadian predecessors, Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell, arguing that while they, too, are concerned with depicting the specifics of the Prairie environment, their approach is shackled by an adherence to the conventions of classic realism. It suggests that such conventions are best an inadequate vehicle for rendering the full gamut of Prairie experience and at worst an artificial set of rules, based on discourses of enclosure better suited to the more bounded worlds of European social situations. In contrast, Kroetsch’s work turns to whimsy, fantasy, ellipsis, discontinuity and incompletion in an endeavour to develop a poetics that will do justice to the complexities of the human relationship with Prairie “distance”. The article also considers the extent to which Kroetsch’s fiction replaces older Prairie gender codes with a new androgynous social model. It concludes by suggesting that his development of a range of non-realistic techniques to give voice to marginalized peoples and places offers a possible blueprint for writers around the globe who face the challenge of how to articulate the experience of unrepresented or under-represented regions.
Keywords
Regional writing, Prairie fiction, Spatial poetics, Robert Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian, Badlands, What the Crow Said
Migrating the Texts: Hybridity as a Postcolonial Literary Construct, ed. Alessandro Monti and John Douthwaite, Turin: L’Harmattan, 2003: 115-36., 2003
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1979
The English Saga is the first of a series of books in progress on the English speaking cultures. ... more The English Saga is the first of a series of books in progress on the English speaking cultures. They are designed for university students who study English, in the understanding that language and culture compose an indivisible whole. The series is intended to contribute to the students’ cultural heritage, to the development of their professional abilities and to their intellectual and spiritual growth. The English Saga offers a succinct description of the evolution and of fundamental forms of expression of the English people. Ever since the origin of this culture, those who have lived the English saga have been pioneers in a number of transcending endeavours. By the 15th century, serfdom had been abolished in England, while this institution lingered on in Europe for centuries bringing human degradation and misery in its wake. In the 17th Century, the English were again forerunners, this time in a revolution that brought the middle classes to power, a political achievement that toge...
http://rupkatha.com/poem-john-thieme/, 2020
Five Poems written in April 2020, reflecting various responses to the pandemic.
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 43, 2: 113-26., 2007
Pre-publication text of this 2007 paper, originally deliverd at the R.K. Narayan Birth Centenary ... more Pre-publication text of this 2007 paper, originally deliverd at the R.K. Narayan Birth Centenary Conference, Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, October 2006.
Abstract
A comment by Narayan on the “false geography” of his “imaginary town” provides the departure-point for a discussion of Malgudi, which argues against the frequently held view that it is a metonym for a quintessential India, or South India. Taking its cue from the cultural geographer Doreen Massey’s assertion that “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple”, the paper contends that Malgudi is a multi-faceted and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of “authentic” Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquity and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. It argues that Malgudi is far more than a physical locus, viewing it as an episteme that incorporates numerous ways of perceiving India – social, spiritual, mythological and psychological among them. Focusing on Narayan’s representation of heterotopias, it considers the demarcations between “pure” and “polluted” space in The English Teacher, the simultaneity of different layers of Indian culture in The Financial Expert and the contrast between Malgudi and a larger Indian world in The Painter of Signs.
Gulliver German-English Yearbook, 8, 1980
This article considers problems facing the African artist in the period shortly after independenc... more This article considers problems facing the African artist in the period shortly after independence, with a particular focus on the use of myth in Armah’s second novel, Fragments. It investigates the novel’s representation of the way myths are co-opted by the new bourgeoisie, specifically the ‘pariah literati’ in Nkrumah’s Ghana, while also suggesting the regenerative potential inherent in traditional myths that have retained their earlier force. It discusses three particular myths that are central to Fragments: the Akan myth of Mame Water and the Musician; the Melanesian myth of the cargo cult, a central myth for societies that have felt the brunt of colonialism; and what Joseph Campbell has referred to as the ‘monomyth’, the supposedly universal myth of the heroic journey. It defends Armah against the twin charges of pessimism and the ahistoricism that can arise when myth is used, in Roland Barthes’ words, as a form of cosmic conservatism. It examines the form of the novel, with reference to Modernism, Marxist ideology and socialist texts, such as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which the protagonist Baako is reading shortly after he returns to Ghana.
A long interview with Mumbai writer, Sunil Sharma, in which I talk about postcolonial issues, par... more A long interview with Mumbai writer, Sunil Sharma, in which I talk about postcolonial issues, particularly my book Postcolonial Con-Texts, my formative influences and eighteenth-century fiction, along with some personal autobiographical reflecitons.
Pre-publication text of an essay included in The Locations of George Lamming, ed. Bill Schwarz, O... more Pre-publication text of an essay included in The Locations of George Lamming, ed. Bill Schwarz, Oxford: Macmillan (Warwick University Caribbean Studies), 2007: 132-50. The essay's main contention is that Lamming’s revisionist use of allegory refashions it as a trope which, despite its supposed colonial genealogy, functions as an instrument for transforming power relations, and which, particularly in Natives of My Person, moves to inhabit a space outside the discursive binaries inherent in the older view of the mode as ‘one thing in words and another in sense’.
Muse India 24 (March-April), 2009
Piya, the cetologist protagonist of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, includes binoculars and a GPS... more Piya, the cetologist protagonist of Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, includes binoculars and a GPS in the equipment that she carries with her on a research trip to the Sundarbans, or “tide country”, region of West Bengal and these can be seen as an index of the novel’s concern with cosmopolitan perspectives on the local. The Hungry Tide provides multiple optics on the Sundarbans’ threatened eco-system of mangrove-forested islands and mudflats, representing the constant transformations it undergoes, because of daily tidal flows, with sections of land being temporarily submerged, and with seawater and freshwater intermingling. It also demonstrates the extent to which the tide country has been a contested site, as a consequence of the differing visions of the many stakeholders in the region – state politicians, local inhabitants, conservationists and tigers among them – and at bipolar extremes has variously been seen as uninhabitable and as fertile territory for utopian projects.
Drawing on recent work on place and space in the field of cultural geography, this paper considers ways in which The Hungry Tide debates ecological issues and projects a human geography that attempts to mediate between cosmopolitan and subaltern voices. The paper suggests that Piya’s situation, as an American of Bengali descent who is returning to her ancestral homeland on a professional mission, refracts back on the novel’s own positioning in relation to its localized South Asian setting.
The online text of this article can be accessed through the Muse India site (www.museindia.com) and typing my surname in the Author’s Index section. It is not readily accessible by going straight to issue 24 of the journal.
Pre-publication text of a contribution to a special issue on Walcott. Published in Agenda 39, 1-3... more Pre-publication text of a contribution to a special issue on Walcott. Published in Agenda 39, 1-3 (2002-3): 287-91.
As the title suggests, this is a personal response to Derek Walcott's poetry and drama. I discuss my response over the years, from the time when I found affinities between Walcott's championing of the St Lucian local and my own experience in Guyana. I conclude that Walcott "is both the most local and the most cosmopolitan of contemporary poets".
Summerhill, 2012
Pre-publication text of a plenary paper delivered at the ‘Dialogues across Boundaries: Debating L... more Pre-publication text of a plenary paper delivered at the ‘Dialogues across Boundaries: Debating Local Cosmopolitanisms’ Conference', University of Southampton, November 2009. Published in Summerhill: Indian Institute of Advanced Study Review, 18, 1 (2012): 9-17.
This essay endeavours to address a range of issues surrounding the varied contemporary uses of the term “cosmopolitanism” in literary and cultural contexts, viewing these against its usage in earlier eras. It engages with a number of questions. What exactly constitutes “cosmopolitanism” today? Should we regard it as a term that describes a particular cast of mind, a geopolitical situation or an ethical obligation? How does it relate to globalization (another chameleon term) and other economies and discursive systems that have crossed national boundaries, such as colonialism and postcolonialism? Is it reasonable to speak of cosmopolitanism in the singular or should we be talking about cosmopolitanisms plural? And do contemporary uses of the term have much in common with earlier understandings of what might constitute “cosmopolitanism”? The essay particularly concerns itself with the Western reception of postcolonial literary cosmopolitanisms and discusses work by Aravind Adiga, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Michael Ondaatje.
Pre-publication text of an essay published in Ecocriticism -- Environments in Anglophone Literatu... more Pre-publication text of an essay published in Ecocriticism -- Environments in Anglophone Literatures, ed. Sonja Frenzel and Birgit Neumann, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017, pp. 151-67. This essay considers literary representations of the figure of the therianthrope (animal-human hybrid) as a potentially productive strategy for countering human appropriations of nonhuman species. After a brief survey of the history of this age-old trope, the essay focuses on its transformative potential in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Indra Sinha's Animal's People. The essay was developed from a paper delivered at an international confernece held at Heinrich Heine University in April 2016.