Professor Publishes First Postcolonial Short Story Anthology
An English professor at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, is co-editor of the first collection of short stories informed by the experience of British colonization.
After only four months on the market, publisher Houghton Mifflin has scheduled a second printing of Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction by Dean Baldwin, professor of English at Penn State Erie, and Patrick J. Quinn, chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. “There isn’t another textbook available that does what ours does,” Baldwin said. “Postcolonial criticism has emerged as one of the liveliest areas of literary study over the past forty years, yet this is the first anthology of short stories to introduce the field in a convenient, accessible single-volume format.”
The 75 short stories in the anthology represent both avenues for colonial and postcolonial literary study—writings by British subjects in a colonial setting, and by the colonized indigenous people of Ireland, Pakistan, India, Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand. The stories span 174 years of Britain’s colonial enterprise, from “Wildgoose Lodge,” William Carleton’s circa-1830 tale of violent Irish Protestant-Catholic infighting, to “Serahabi’s Story,” a contemporary meditation on mother-daughter relationships colored by the culture of author Bapsi Sidhwa’s native Pakistan.
Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction includes stories by familiar authors whose works are read beyond literary criticism circles, such as Salman Rushdie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid, and introduces regional authors to a wider audience. Selection of the stories was based in part on feedback from students in Baldwin’s course English 182: Literature and Empire. “By letting me know which stories they responded to—and which they found boring—Penn State Erie students influenced the aim, scope, and emphasis of the anthology.”
Additionally, all stories were originally written in English. “We did that in part to avoid problems of translation, but also because writing in English, the language of the conquering nation, is itself a controversial subject within postcolonial studies and a manifestation of the enduring influence of colonialism,” Baldwin explained.
Baldwin and Quinn precede each story with a short biography of the author that places him or her in historical and geographical context. Stories are also footnoted to help readers grasp unfamiliar references and regional colloquialisms.
Dean Baldwin has taught English and English literature at Penn State Erie since 1975. His previous books include critical biographies of H. E. Bates and V. S. Pritchett, a study of Virginia Woolf’s short fiction, a bibliography of short story criticism co-written with Gregory Morris, Penn State Erie professor of American literature, and a volume in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-1980. He also edited a previous short story collection, The Riverside Anthology of Short Fiction: Convention and Innovation (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
Baldwin earned his B.A. in 1964 from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1972. Since 1999, he has regularly led groups of Penn State students to Northampton, England, for a summer study abroad experience. He has served as president of the Pennsylvania College English Association and the College English Association, and in 1990 founded Books for Kids, Erie Chapter, a nonprofit organization dedicated to literacy that has distributed some 165,000 books to needy children in Erie County.
Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction is available for purchase at the Penn State Erie bookstore, or online at www.barnesandnoble.com.