Few people are so widely read within Commonwealth literature or are so knowledgeable about so many different cultures as Jean-Pierre Durix. . . . The first part of the book deals with general, theoretical themes (e.g., the writer as teacher), while the second contains studies of single novels by such writers as Patrick White, C.K. Stead, and Salmon Rushdie; here Durix is at his best. Choice

Exploring the relationship between the writer and his craft, between the artist and society, between the creator and his conception of creation, this fascinating study takes up various key positions represented by major writers from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, and examines the practice of literature, which is frequently concerned with a search for problematic roots and authenticity in its relation with didacticism, social concern, language and myth. The distinctively comparative approach brings together a series of close textual studies and examines four examples of metafiction from which emerge a number of specific features characteristic of literatures born out of Colonialism and its aftermath. Seen in this perspective, literary scholarship provides an irreplaceable point of view from which to assess the role of the imagination in multi-cultural societies.

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