Neil Lazarus is Professor of English at the University of Warwick. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (2004).

• Introduction: the political unconscious of postcolonial studies; 1. The politics of postcolonial modernism; 2. Fredric Jameson on 'third-world literature': a qualified defence; 3. 'A figure glimpsed in a rear-view mirror': the question of representation in 'postcolonial' fiction; 4. Frantz Fanon after the 'postcolonial prerogative'; 5. The battle over Edward Said.

'Neil Lazarus's scale is that of the epic, for he knows that what is happening in the field of Postcolonial Studies is an entire re-thinking of the questions, procedures and visions that have guided us over the last thirty years. The Postcolonial Unconscious is the work of a passionate intellectual craftsman.' Ato Quayson, University of Toronto