Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus Transportal Literatures of Empire, Nationalism, and Sectarianism

This book analyses colonial and postcolonial writing about Cyprus, before and after its independence from the British Empire in 1960. These works are understood as ‘transportal literatures’ in that they navigate the liminal and layered forms of colonialism which impede the freedom of the island, including the residues of British imperialism, the impact of Greek and Turkish nationalisms, and the ethnolinguistic border between north and south. This study puts pressure on the postcolonial discipline by evaluating the unique hegemonic relationship Cyprus has with three metropolitan centres, not one. The print languages associated with each centre (English, Greek, and Turkish) are complicit in neo-colonial activity. Contemporary Cypriot writers address this in order to resist sectarian division and grapple with their deferred postcoloniality.

1. Chapter One: ‘The Key of Western Asia’: An Introduction to Transportal Literatures.- 2. Chapter Two: ‘A Business of Some Heat’: Sexuality, Disease, and Gendered Orientalism on Venus’ Island, 1878-1973. - 3. Chapter Three: Re-Imagining the Cypriot Nation: Writing-Back to the Colonial Travelogue, 1964-1974.- 4. Chapter Four: Travelling Across the Buffer Zone: Intersections in Language, Genre, and Identity, 2000-2013.- 5. Chapter Five: Re-Gendering Borders: Partition in Contemporary Cypriot Women’s Writing.

Dr Daniele Nunziata is a Lecturer in English Literature at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK. His research on postcolonial literature has been published in numerous journals (including PMLA and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and in the Columbia University Press series, Studies in World Literature. He is a contributor to Writers Make Worlds.