"Peter Kalliney's fine book combines a subtle historical sociology of literature with skillful close readings of literary texts to provide a new mapping of the period of late literary modernism and early postcolonial literature. ... Kalliney has a rare gift for joining clear, consistent argument to subtle analysis that is open to complexity and contradiction. ... This book should change the way that scholars of postcolonial literature and modernist literature view the cultural history of this period." --New West Indian Guide

"Commonwealth of Letters is an original and revisionist account of the historical encounter between the writers and institutions of English modernism and late colonial intellectuals, informed by solid archival research and refreshing new readings of the postcolonial canon, and keenly attuned to the complex history of cultural exchanges across the Atlantic." --Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste

"For too long, modernist autonomy and postcolonial politics were thought to be antithetical. This book's splendid research deals this dichotomy a convincing blow. With illuminating insights into crossracial networks in radio, publishing, and other cultural institutions, Kalliney brilliantly shows how modernism enriched African and Caribbean literatures and was itself sustained by them." --Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics

"A fascinating study which explores how modernist ideas influenced a generation of black and white writers-often working sideby-side-and created international networks of affiliation which rise up above race or geography. An illuminating and convincing examination of Anglophone literary history in the second half of the twentieth century." -- Caryl Phillips, author of Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11

"This densely argued study covers a lot of ground, from literary modernism to postcolonial Anglophone literature from the West Indies and Afria. The book's bibloiography testifies to Kalliney's prodigious research." --M.S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton, CHOICE

"Kalliney's argument is extensive, meticulously researched, and compellingly revisionist... Kalliney provides a startling and thorough reimagining of the complex lines of aesthetic, philosophic, and institutional affiliation between metropolitan and colonial authors in the period 1930-70." --Novel