John Thieme

Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet.Focusing on fiction set in the ‘long present’ – a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present – Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat.Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

This collection brings together a series of individual poems, which for the most part are not closely connected, and 'Massiah', a sequence of verse narratives told in a Guyanese barber shop, where there is continuity from one to the next. Some of the individual poems were written in response to invitations for submissions on particular subjects. These include three on war and peace and five short pieces written during the time of the pandemic, but the remainder are more scattered in theme, tone and form. The spark for most of these came, uninvited and unsolicited, into my mind, demanding to be developed into a finished piece for dissemination on page or screen. However, when I began to gather these poems together for this volume, I became aware of two recurring concerns. (John Thieme)

Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet.Focusing on fiction set in the ‘long present’ – a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present – Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat.Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

The Book of Francis Barber is the fictional autobiography of Dr Samuel Johnson's Jamaican-born manservant, whom Johnson made his residuary legatee. Francis believes his new-found wealth will propel him into the upper echelons of English society, but ensuing events gradually show him that "class" is not easily acquired. As his story unfolds, it becomes clear that his racial origins are an obstacle to his ambitions. The novel is both a major new contribution to eighteenth-century historical fiction, and a warm portrait of its sympathetic narrator's journey towards self-realization.

John Thieme's verse makes our flattened earth round again, reinventing it through a series of dreaming reveries that expand the possibilities of poetry and imagine new worlds into being. His poems are crowded with figures from different cultures and eras, among them Marco Polo's Chinese mistress, Amazonian tribesmen, lacklustre vampires, an anachronistic courtly lover, the aged librarian of the library of Babel, Scheherazade, the Hindu goddess Saraswati, Ben Gunn, the apostle Thomas, a pragmatic dog and a quartet of rescued Iberian tortoises. Breaking boundaries and moving quietly between convention and innovation, the sparkling imagery of Paco's Atlas upends habitual modes of perception. We come away from the collection with a broader sense of what it is to be human, our limits and our capabilities. A folio of maps in verse, Paco's Atlas shape-shifts and spills over the borders and frames of atlases geographical, ethnographical, anatomical and zoological. It is filled with the wonder, the horror and the irony of maps: surreal dissections, absurd projections, encyclopaedic compressions, the circular logic of treasure-island shorelines that trap Ben Gunn like vampire bats under the sign of Nosferatu.Vassilena ParashkevovaJohn Thieme's books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, The Arnold Anthology of Postcolonial Writing in English and studies of Derek Walcott, R.K. Narayan and V.S. Naipaul. His poetry and fiction have been published in numerous journals around the world, including Setu, The International Literary Quarterly, Asia Literary Review, Quick Fictions, Muse India and Southeast Asian Review of English. Paco's Atlas is his first collection of poems.

This book examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It offers a unique understanding of the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography, with chapters on cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, as well as reference to the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Its range and insights make it essential reading for anyone interested in the changing physical and human geography of the contemporary world.

R.K. Narayan’s reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of “authentic” Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan’s writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi.Narayan’s imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan’s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

R.K. Narayan’s reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of “authentic” Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan’s writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi.Narayan’s imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan’s fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.

This glossary offers an interdisciplinary guide to the various concepts, practices and cultural products that have come to be known as 'postcolonial'. In addition to providing an essential orientation map for undergraduates taking courses in postcolonial literature and theory and postcolonial studies more generally, its range makes it a indispensable reference tool for those who have been working in the field for some time.

In recent years works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which 'write back' to classic English texts, have attracted considerable attention as offering a paradigm for the relationship between post-colonial writing and the 'canon'. Thieme's study provides a broad overview of such writing, focusing both on responses to texts that have frequently been associated with the colonial project or the construction of 'race' (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and Othello) and texts where the interaction between culture and imperialism is slightly less overt (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The post-colonial con-texts examined are located within their particular social and cultural backgrounds with emphasis on the different forms their responses to their pre-texts take and the extent to which they create their own discursive space. Using Edward Said's models of filiative relationships and affiliative identifications, the book argues that 'writing back' is seldom adversarial, rather that it operates along a continuum between complicity and oppositionality that dismantles hierarchical positioning. It also suggests that post-colonial appropriations of canonical pre-texts frequently generate re-readings of their 'originals'. It concludes by considering the implications of this argument for discussions of identity politics and literary genealogies more generally. Authors examined include Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Kamau Brathwaite, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Robertson Davies, Wilson Harris, Elizabeth Jolley, Robert Kroetsch, George Lamming, Margaret Laurence, Pauline Melville, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Djanet Sears, Sam Selvon, Olive Senior, Jane Urquhart and Derek Walcott.

This book provides a unique account of Walcott's development as a writer in addition to being the fullest study of his poetry and plays to date.Discusses all his major works and includes information on his out-of-print and unpublished plays along with .