Wole Soyinka, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee - postcolonial writers from around the world now enjoy wide popularity. In this book, Elleke Boehmer looks challengingly at the history of such writing, how it developed and how it departs from writing in the Empire in the Victorian period.

Throughout this literature key themes and images - journeying, loss, the search for community, the arrival of the stranger - are expanded and redefined. Boehmer discusses these with reference to a broad range of texts, from Trollope, Kipling, Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield, to authors as recent as Ben Okri and Michael Ondaatje, and the Aboriginal Australians Sally Morgan and Mudrooroo.