Faber Faber

This book is the first book-length study to explore the sartorial politics of identity in the literature of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Using fashion and dress as the main focus of analysis, and linking them with a myriad of identity concerns, the book takes the reader on a journey from the eighteenth century to the new millennium, from early travel account by South Asian writers to contemporary British-Asian fictions. Besides sartorial readings of other key authors and texts, the book provides an in-depth exploration of Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).This work examines what an analysis of dress contributes to the interpretation of the featured texts, their contexts and identity politics, but it also considers what literature has added to past and present discussions on the South Asian dressed body in Br itain. Endowed with an interdisciplinary emphasis, the book is of interest to students and academics in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, socio-cultural studies and fashion theory.

"Poetry born of historical upheaval bears witness both to actual historical events and considerations of poetics. Under the duress of history the poet, who is torn between lamentation and celebration, seeks to achieve distance from his troubled times. Add to this a deep love for and commitment to the Irish and English poetic traditions, and a strong desire to search for models outside his culture, and you have the poetry of the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-). In this study, Carmen Bugan looks at how the poetry of Seamus Heaney, born of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has encountered the'historically-tested imaginations' of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, as he aimed to fulfil a Horatian poetics, a poetry meant to both instruct and delight its readers. Carmen Bugan is the author of a collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, and a memoir, Burying the Typewriter."