Search results for ""Author Corinne Fowler""
Peepal Tree Press Ltd Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections
Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England’s links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain’s cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons’ ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness.
£17.99
Penguin Books Ltd Our Island Stories
''This is an essential and fascinating book because it brings to light, through conversations and nature walks, some of the buried connections between Britain's landscape and historic buildings and its complicated hidden histories. Fowler does not judge or diminish, but enriches and deepens our understanding of this nation'' Bernardine Evaristo''This is real, difficult, essential history delivered in the most eloquent and accessible way. Her case, that rural Britain has been shaped by imperialism, is unanswerable, and she makes her arguments beautifully. An important book'' Sathnam Sanghera ''A detailed and thoughtful exploration of historical connections that for too long have been obscured. A powerful book that brings the history of the Empire home literally'' David OlusogaThe countryside is cherished by many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country h
£22.50
Manchester University Press Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture
Postcolonial Manchester offers a radical new perspective on Britain’s devolved literary cultures by focusing on Manchester’s vibrant, multicultural literary scene. Referencing Avtar Brah’s concept of ‘diaspora space’, the authors argue that Manchester is, and always has been, a quintessentially migrant city to which workers of all nationalities and cultures have been drawn since its origins in the cotton trade and the expansion of the British Empire. This colonial legacy – and the inequalities upon which it turns – is a recurrent motif in the texts and poetry performances of the contemporary Mancunian writers featured here, many of them members of the city’s long-established African, African-Caribbean, Asian, Chinese, Irish and Jewish diasporic communities. By turning the spotlight on Manchester’s rich, yet under-represented, literary tradition in this way, Postcolonial Manchester also argues for the devolution of the canon of English Literature and, in particular, recognition for contemporary black and Asian literary culture outside of London.
£85.00