Lifting the Sentence

Is the term "postcolonial fiction" meaningful? Is there any such thing as a postcolonial literary aesthetic? Robert Fraser's contention in this thought-provoking book is that these questions can be answered in the affirmative only if postcoloniality is interpreted, less as a condition than as a development through six specified historical phases. As the penal "sentence" of imperialism is gradually lifted, he argues, successive types of syntactical "sentence" have come into play: colonial and postcolonial grammars, distinctive uses of person, tense, mood, and form.