Bruce King - From New National to World Literature: Essays and Reviews

I have been writing about literature for sixty years. The fo l lowing pages consist of a selection that I and others have made from my essays, articles, and reviews about what is variously called New National, Commonwealth, Postcolonial, International, and World English literature. The many names for a developing body of liter a ture is itself significant and the republished pieces, besides their individual interest, can be read as a story about how a major area of literary study has developed and the political and cultural changes it represents. Such a story told through reviews of literature is bound to be personal, even autobiographical, influenced by where I taught and what interested me at the time along with what was happening in the literary and cultural world and the concepts and associations that were being created. Someone with a different life and different publications would tell a somewhat different story, but except for some juggling of the chronology it would probably tell a similar tale of how the centrality of British literature was challenged by the d e velopment of other national literatures until it was commonly a c cepted that we live during a time of International or World Liter a ture.

This possibility was anticipated in the title of the journal World Literature Written in English (1973 2004) , the direct progen i tor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2005 ), founded and long edited by Janet Wilson who is also co-editor of the series in which these selected essays and reviews are republished. In what I now regard as the early stages of this literary and cultural revolution , I commissioned and edited a book titled Literatures of the World in English (1974); for those involved the scent of the future was already in the air.

The following pages are in eight sections: 1) Introduction and Derry Jeffares , 2) African Literature , 3) Commonwealth or New Liter a tures? , 4) West Indian Literature , 5) Writers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand , 6) Internationalising British Literature , 7) Indian Li t erature , and 8) Pakistani and Muslim Writing.

The collection starts with an autobiographical essay to i n troduce myself, but also so those unfamiliar with the history of this field can learn about A. Norman Derry Jeffares who shaped the organising and promotion of the study of the new English literature s in England, the Commonwealth, and in Europe. Those reading Inte r national English or Postcolonial literatures today are, probably wit h out being aware of it, indebted to him. Although not a literary critic, theorist, and certainly not an intellectual, he changed the shape of literary studies at a time when it still primarily meant the literature of England.

Born in Ireland, trained as a classicist, he was not at ease in the many literary and cultural disputes of the period, but he was an organiser, an entrepreneur among literary studies, someone who saw signs of the future and knew how to speed it up while making use of it. Already as a schoolboy he had written to and obtained an unpublished poem from W. B. Yeats for his school magazine. After Yeats s death he obtained Yeats s papers from the widow and wrote a monumental study of the authors life and work. He was 30 years old when appointed to a named university professorship in Austra l ia , and when he moved to Leeds University, England, where I was working towards a doctorate, he began to reconstruct English stu d ies by introducing courses in American literature (then rare in En g land) and Commonwealth L iterature, holding the first conference for the study of Commonwealth L iterature at Leeds during the summer of 1964; he was co-founder of the Association for the study of Anglo-Irish literature (1970). He also started the journal ARIEL ( A Review of International English Literature ). If I and others taught in Africa, New Zealand, Canada, or Australia, it was because Jeffares made the co n tacts, wrote recommendations, and was persuasive.

While literary, social , and cultural snobs, and , yes , racists were still mocking colonial writers and manners, Jeffares was building a network of young scholars who would write about and teach courses in the literatures of Africa, Ireland, the Commonwealth and who often knew many of the writers personally. I shared in the excitement and opportunities of this period of decolonization when the political and cultural assertion of former colonies and British dominions required the establishment of many new universities and emphasis on local history, society, and arts. My essay was published in a collection titled A Shaping of Connections (1989) devoted to pioneers of Commo n wealth li terary studies intended to hono r Jeffares role.

There were others with different, wrong ideas, about how to shape the study of the then rapidly- evolving world English literature. An American professor at the University of Texas (and an influence on the creation of the journal World Literature Written in English ) recognised that the world was changing and it was necessary to be aware of literature outside England and the USA, but he felt that the place in which the writing was set made it part of that national liter a ture: a Graham Greene novel set in Sierra Leone was a work of Afr i can literature, an Anthony Burgess novel could be Malaysian liter a ture. A few others teaching in the United States offered pioneering university courses in the English literature outside England and America, in other words writing from the British colonies and d o minions. There were such literatures and a few dutiful books about them, but their histories began to be interesting only with the eme r gence of a body of writing and majo r authors that accompanied post- World War II decolonization. Just as the United States was promoting and helping financially to support American literature and American Studies during the Cold War, so England had an interest in tran s forming the British Commonwealth into a Commonwealth of ind e pendent nations, and this at first was the natural first stage for the study of world English literature before it became entangled with other awarenesses such as diasporas, gender, and the construction of society, nation and culture.

Jeffares was the creative outsider who ignored the sno b beries, critical theories and academic cults that shaped English stu d ies at the time. He earned money and prestige from creating such influential series of books as Writers and Critics, and buil t up the study of Commonwealth L iterature at Leeds University, other pr o vincial English universities, and abroad, long before Oxford, Ca m bridge, Harvard, and other, older, established universities recognised that literary studies had to change because of the writing that was coming from newly independent nations and cultural decolonization.

I had thought of including in this selection my early essay Yeatss Irishry Prose from Centenary Essays on the Art of W. B. Yeats (Ibadan University Press, 1965: 122-136). It might have seemed an oddity, especially as I had written about African literature earlier, but that was mostly about Francophonic African literature which along with black American writing was the starting place for many of us who b e came interested in the new English language literature that was appea r ing in Africa. I mention my essay on Yeats as transitional at a time when critics were asking how literature and the use of English from the United States, Ireland and England differ from each other. Soon we would be asking the same questions about writing from such nations as Nigeria, Australia, and India, but the issues first became apparent with American literature and how it might be unlike literature written in England. Not just different in setting and subject matter but also in language, rhythm, conventions, literary kinds. American literature could be said to be the primal postcolonial literature in English and from the nineteenth cent u ry onwards presented alternatives to writers from British colonies and d ominions. Americans such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams showed what might be done with local material, local speech and voices, and how to invent new literary styles distinctive from those common to England.