In 1954, the Empire was only beginning to ‘write back’, as many areas such as Trinidad, Jamaica, Kenya, and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) were still under British authority. Postcolonial writing as we know it today scarcely existed, and few colonial writers had entered the mainstream of British letters. Indeed, when V.S. Naipaul came to Oxford on scholarship to study literature, he found a strict curriculum “of dead white male poets, playwrights, and novelists from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century…Twentieth-century writers were seen as untested, and suspected, and were excluded” (French 113). And even the few modern writers who did muscle into the mainstream were hardly from the colonies. Nevertheless, he was determined to become a successful literary émigré, though his…
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Citation: Grasso, Joshua. "Miguel Street". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 July 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3585, accessed 24 November 2024.]
