Laura A. Doyle

This study rethinks English-language literary history, contributing to genre studies of the novel as well as to modernist and postcolonial studies, and fashioning a more dialectical understanding of artistic creation within colonial contact zones. It traces how, since the eighteenth century, many generations of cultural exchange and appropriation have become embedded, palimpsestically, in English-language aesthetic forms (for instance in what the British called the “oriental tale”), forming English fiction from the outside in. It then studies how Anglophone modernism and postcolonial fiction are linked by their insistent reworking of these layered, history-bearing forms.