The end of the various colonial empires in the middle of the twentieth century saw an explosion of literatures from the newly emergent postcolonial societies. The aim of this module is to introduce students to the postcolonial novel—its generative contexts, the critical debates that have shaped its consolidation as a field of academic inquiry, and the dominant preoccupations that have determined its themes and shaped its development: language, gender, migration, colonialism, nationalism, social and cultural change, identity and representation and postcolonial disillusion. While the cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts of these novels from Britain’s erstwhile empire will be given considerable attention, the module privileges questions relating to aesthetics and form as well as questions of literary value and canonicity.