Excerpt from the introduction: Given the economic deprivation and social exclusion that many Indigenous Australians face, it comes as little surprise that issues such as poverty, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse also feature prominently in Aboriginal literature, across all genres. More recent examples include, for instance, poetry by Romaine Moreton, the poetic memoir Too […]
Story Cycles (chapter from American Literature in Transition 1990-2000)
From the first paragraph: In 2001, James Nagel observed that “never has the genre of the short-story cycle been used with greater force or variety than in the American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, when it became the genre of choice for emerging writers from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds.” More recently, […]
Two Worlds in One Book: “Ways of Sunlight” and the Migrant Short Story Cycle
This chapter argues that Sam Selvon’s short story sequence “Ways of Sunlight” (1957) pioneered a specific technique of constructing coherence between different narratives. While its first nine stories are grouped together under the title of “Trinidad,” the remaining ten appear in a section named “London.” Although the London stories ultimately bridge that separation by depicting […]