| 英文摘要 |
The study of writing from outside the UK and the US and the perspectives from which it was viewed underwent a major sea change in Britain in the 1980s. Among the factors contributing to this were the rise of Cultural Studies, the influence of continental theory on the British academy, a felt need to respond to the inner-city uprisings of 1981, and an interrogation of the term “Commonwealth literature,” which at the beginning of the decade was the favored rubric under which Anglophone world literatures were studied in the small number of British universities that included them in their curricula. In the early eighties, when the term “postcolonial” was used, usually with a hyphen, it was mainly as a temporal marker, to indicate the period after colonialism. By the end of the decade, postcolonial studies, still in their infancy, had broader connotations and were making an impact as a field of study and as a critical practice that interrogated the hitherto largely unquestioned assumptions that had dominated the study of world literatures. More generally, while the UK's culture wars were less obviously combative than those being fought in the US, they were nevertheless transforming “English Studies” in radical ways and, in some cases, with the rise of Cultural Studies, challenging the integrity of the subject as a free-standing discipline. During the eighties I was teaching in London, in a theoretically progressive department, and I was fortunate to be involved in various initiatives to reshape and promote the study of Commonwealth/postcolonial literatures. |
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