A World Without Maps: Post-National, English-Language Literature in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

A consideration of a constellation of authors working in the fiction marketplace of the late twentieth century. The works of Michael Ondaatje, Jhumpa Lahiri, Aleksandar Hemon, and Anne Michaels are considered. The works are particularly analyzed for the way that they choose to depict the process of crossing borders and refugee life. The authors are grouped together along certain broad critical lines -- particularly along the way that they present the refugee experience with the voice of interiority. Links are then provided to the textual predecessors of these texts and writers, many of whom belong to the Modernist moment: Forster, Conrad, Kipling, and others. Some work is done to establish and define the term, post-national.