Writing After Postcolonialism

Reviews / Votes

An erudite, broad-ranging and historically grounded book. Its illuminating textual analyses are interwoven with sustained theoretical reflection. Hiddleston clarifies the status and function of literature during the transitional cultural moments that can inspire creative engagements with politics. She renews our understanding of the unsettling consequences of aesthetic experimentation. The book will become an indispensable resource for the study of North African writing. * Francoise Lionnet, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (French) and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, USA * In her new book, Jane Hiddleston analyses North African literary production in French since the 1980s. She draws on a remarkably rich corpus of material, and seeks to understand the privileged status of reading and writing in countries struggling to achieve stability after the end of colonialism. The volume explores the extent to which writing from the Maghreb operates as a zone of translation and experimentation. It is essential reading for all those interested in postcolonial literatures in French - but also for students and scholars working on postcoloniality and creativity more generally. * Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool, AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for 'Translating Cultures' * Written with assured clarity, Hiddleston offers intellectually rigorous readings of some of the greatest francophone novels to have emerged from post-independence North Africa. Writing After Postcolonialism makes a very real contribution to our understanding of francophone literature from this region and in doing so compels us to reflect on the categories of postcolonialism and of world literature and our neglect of non-European literary traditions such as that of the Thousand and One Nights * Patrick Crowley, University College Cork, Ireland * The study is well researched and extremely readable. Although some familiarity with Francophone North African literature would be helpful, all scholars working in fields related to postcolonial or Francophone literature should find this text a fruitful read. Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE * Hiddleston's work offers a comprehensive survey of North Africa's ongoing socio-political factional struggles, as well as of the literary cultures and status of French in literary production in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia which will be of great interest both to the general reader and to scholars researching postcolonial writing. [...] This impressively erudite work, which marshals an array of different theoretical approaches to elucidate its textual readings and draws out numerous insightful parallels between writers, foregrounds the creative fluidity, the singularity of every reader's encounter with the textual object. * Forum for Modern Language Studies *