Strange/Stranger

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 29.1 (Strange/Stranger) deals with such widespread notions as “strangeness”, “otherness” , “the other”, “foreignness” and “the foreign”. This topic is central to the current preoccupations of scholars in the field of postcolonial literature and theory and may explain the wide geographical range of the articles concerned. These in effect cover every major region relating to the former British Empire: Asia (5), Africa (1), Australia (2), the Caribbean (2), and Canada (1). It also explains the variety of approaches taken by contributors, whether thematic (the use of sex and myth as paradigms of postcolonial tensions), formal (the postmodernist recourse to textual recycling or dialogism), or socio-cultural (the anthology as a meta-literary statement revelatory of the postcolonial writer’s problematic relationship with the literary tradition he has inherited). One may also mention the variety of genres and forms selected for consideration, extending from the fore-mentioned anthologies to the biographical text, passing through the novel, the short story, the verse fable and poetry