Extravagant Strangers - A Literature of Belonging (Paperback, A Vintage International original, 1st ed)

Extravagant Strangers is renowned author Caryl Phillips's very personal response to the popular idea that "outsiders" in Britain are currently reinvigorating the literary canon. Phillips shows that in fact English literature has never been homogenous: it has been shaped and influenced by outsiders for at least two hundred years.

Included in Extravagant Strangers are slave writers, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho; Britons born in the colonies, such as Thackeray, Kipling, and Orwell; "subject writers", such as C.L.R. James and V. S. Naipaul; and "postcolonial" observers of Britain, such as Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and Anita Desai. With this eloquent and often inspiring collection, Caryl Phillips proves, if proof be needed, that the greatest literature is often born out of irreconcilable tensions between a writer and his or her society.