In gorgeous prose, Saikat Majumdar conjures up scenes of autodidacts and amateur readers in the colonies, describing their idiosyncratic, haphazard, and ambivalent encounters with books. These encounters, he shows, have much to teach scholars of literature. A brilliant and groundbreaking contribution to postcolonial studies as well as to debates about the aims, methods, and value of reading.

Rita Felski, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA

This fascinating, beautifully written book opens up a whole new world. It's about colonial amateur readers, readers from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, who loved literature from the far-reaches of empire and who often struggled to come to terms with what their love of canonical white literature meant to them and others. Funnily enough that is now a struggle even those of us who love literature closer to the centre share: why do we love these classics so much, remote as they are from most of those around us and indeed from the world we actually live in? A book, then, that anyone interested in great literature can learn from.

Simon During, Honorary Professor of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Australia

In an age of hyper-professionalism, where the amateur and the autodidact has been deemed marginal, The Amateur shows the possibilities, pleasures and productive potential of amateur reading, even –perhaps especially – when undertaken in colonial and postcolonial settings. Readers in the colonies and in the postcolony avidly read the literature of their imperial overlords in ways which were unexpected and sometimes, as with Naipaul, Toru Dutt, CLR James and others discussed here, highly generative. Majumdar's deft history of amateur reading and criticism doubles up as a history of literary humanities across the reaches of the British empire, including India, South Africa and the Caribbean. Scholarly and erudite, but also playful and engaging, this is an important book that should be read by all those interested in English literature, colonial and postcolonial studies.

Sanjay Seth, Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

An unusual and innovative work, The Amateur reads a long line of colonial readers who blossom into writers – in India, Africa, and the Caribbean – and miraculously turn the reading of the colonizers' literature into an improbable vehicle for their personal and at times collective means of imaginative liberation.

Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Columbia University, USA

Saikat Majumdar's The Amateur opens up a startlingly fresh perspective on [the role of Western education in Britain's colonies] ... [A] beautifully written scholarly book on the limits of scholarly reading and writing.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

This exceedingly well-researched book merits the attention of readers interested in the philosophy of literature and in literary criticism as a phenomenon in its own right. Particularly crucial is the area where the postcolony meets the amateur reader-the socially active amateur. This very approachable monograph reads like a good novel-the sort where, by the ending, a reader wants more.

Philosophy in Review