AustLit

'Over the past four decades, the study of the New Literatures in English has seen far-reaching changes. After the rugged pioneer days of the 1960s and 1970s, when first attempts at establishing national or regional literatures, let alone the more macroscopic domain of the New Litera-tures, as an academic field were greeted in many university departments with condescension, suspicion or even hostility, a first phase of consolidation was marked from the late 1970s onwards by a move to branch out into a wider variety of theoretical directions. One of these - a critical current drawing heavily on post-modem and poststructuralist thought that was eventually to be designated as 'postcolonialism' - proved to be particularly influential from the late 1980s on-wards. It redefined and renamed the whole field, and finally ushered in a new phase of rapid disciplinary growth that has catapulted what is today generally known as 'postcolonial studies' into the front rank of international academia. What to a cursory outside glance may appear to be a fairly straightforward story of disciplinary progress from critical rags to epistemological riches has, for many in the field, unfolded as a much more complex, contradictory and at times deeply puzzling process. ' (Introduction)