![]() It is the writer as a 'daughter' figure looking back and restoring-resurrecting-rediscovering a lost-forgotten-erased 'foremother'. The volume is wound up with an afterword or 'Postface' highlighting a particular paradigm of female bonding which has been operative behind a spectrum of women's writing in the emerging territories of English literature today. Needless to say, the 'emerging territories' are too vast and unique to be adequately explored by any single anthology the spectrum is far too wide for the scope of a single volume, and the only justification of such a project is to be found in the fond hope that the 'little done' would stir our interest in the 'undone vast'. Chapter One (Emerging Territories…), Chapter Thirteen (Niranjan Mohanty's Krishna… ), and Chapter Seventeen (Postface…) were not published before. I hope, however, these are not enough to disturb or detract from the reader's response, because in this regard I fully share the anxiety with no less a person than Umberto Eco, that "Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader"(On Literature 334). As a result the careful reader can trace some repetition of ideas or themes here and there. Anyway, the articles have been revised, some thoroughly re-written, some shortened and touched up a bit, while some others expanded with new material added up but generally these have been allowed to retain their original line of argument. The articles in the present volume were written on various occasions, often on request to contribute to a volume or to speak in a seminar, etc. This is followed by four articles-one each -on some canonical English writing of Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and the No cut-off date as such had been set while selecting authors/texts for the respective chapters anyway, these include an African text of 1958, a Caribbean novel of 1966, a New Zealand anthology of 1989, and other texts from Canada, Australia, India and Indian diaspora written on either side of the millennium. A Key-Note address to a seminar on the subject introduces the theme of the book. The present volume offers selective studies on contemporary texts representing at least some of the various facets/ dimensions/ layers of the many emerging 'territories' in English literatures today. This is perhaps the newest trend, the most recently emerging territory which will be the end-result of 'overlapping territories' and 'intertwining histories', and, let us hope, will usher in a better future. Since English literature offers the widest platform for cultural interaction of the world today, it should be the special prerogative of practitioners, readers and scholars of English literature/s over the world today to watch and follow this emerging process of 'cultural cross-pollination', its mystique and wonder, as the huge flow of English literature changes course along an unprecedented turn of man's cultural history, with the aspiration to 'overlap territories' and 'intertwine histories'. However, postcolonial writing has not stopped there, but has also expanded in multifarious directions in the recent decades, and today it has reached a stage where, at least in the hands of some avant-garde writers, it seems to have embraced postmodernism and reached beyond. These are typical question-marks arising out of the vital issue of roots and identity that persistently surfaces in postcolonial writing since its inception. 'Who am I when I am transported?' -is the puzzle that haunts Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, the convict who had been shipped off from his British homeland to the penal colony of Australia. These 'Who am I? Why am I here?', asks Jean Rhys's Antoinette when she is transported from her Caribbean island home to the 'white island' of Britain. While the mainstream British literature itself presents today a scenario of wonderful plurality, one can only guess the immeasurable richness of content and variety of directions projected by the other English literatures, which epitomize 'God's plenty', and have been coming up in great waves across the seven seas and oceans.
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