The Postcolonial Epic

The Postcolonial Epic PDF Author: Sneharika Roy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351201573
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the epic genre’s enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the ‘postcolonial epic’, ushered in by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy. The work focuses on the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of ‘political epic’, where an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s ‘pure’ origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from ‘other’ cultures. An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies.

The Postcolonial Epic

The Postcolonial Epic PDF Author: Sneharika Roy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351201573
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the epic genre’s enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the ‘postcolonial epic’, ushered in by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy. The work focuses on the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of ‘political epic’, where an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s ‘pure’ origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from ‘other’ cultures. An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies.

Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique

Literary Form as Postcolonial Critique PDF Author: Katharine Burkitt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317104617
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Focusing on works by Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Anne Carson, and Bernardine Evaristo, Katharine Burkitt investigates the relationship between literary form and textual politics in postcolonial narrative poems and verse-novels. Burkitt argues that these works disrupt and undermine the traditions of particular forms and genres, and most notably the expectations attached to the prose novel, poetry, and epic. This subversion of form, Burkitt argues, is an important aspect of the texts' postcoloniality as they locate themselves critically in relation to literary convention, and they are all concerned with matters of social, racial, and national identities in a world where these categories are inherently complicated. In addition, the awareness of epic tradition in these texts unites them as 'post-epics', in that as they reuse the myths and motifs of a variety of epics, they question the status of the form, demonstrate it to be inherently malleable, and regenerate its stories for the contemporary world. As she examines the ways in which postcolonial texts rewrite the traditions of classical epics for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Burkitt ties close textual analysis to a critical intervention in the politics of form.

Late Colonial Sublime

Late Colonial Sublime PDF Author: G. S. Sahota
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810136503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Taking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime reconstellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism and postcolonial critique, this book forges an innovative approach to the question of late romanticism and grounds categories such as the sublime within the dynamic of commodification. While G. S. Sahota takes canonical European critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the outskirts of empire, he reads Indian writers such as Muhammad Iqbal and Jayashankar Prasad in light of the expansion of instrumental rationality and the neotraditional critiques of the West it spurred at the onset of decolonization. By bringing together distinct literary canons—both metropolitan and colonial, hegemonic and subaltern, Western and Eastern, all of which took shape upon the common realities of imperial capitalism—Late Colonial Sublime takes an original dialectical approach. It experiments with fragments, parallaxes, and constellational form to explore the aporias of modernity as well as the possible futures they may signal in our midst. A bold intervention into contemporary debates that synthesizes a wealth of sources, this book will interest readers and scholars in world literature, critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and South Asian studies.

The Cambridge Guide to Homer

The Cambridge Guide to Homer PDF Author: Corinne Ondine Pache
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108663621
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 974

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Book Description
From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

Epic of the Dispossessed

Epic of the Dispossessed PDF Author: Robert D. Hamner
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Hamner describes Omeros as an epic of the dispossessed because each of its protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another. Regardless of whether their ancestry is traced to the classical Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, or confined to the Americas, they are transplanted individuals whose separate quests all center on the fundamental human need to strike roots in a place where one belongs.

The Postcolonial Orient

The Postcolonial Orient PDF Author: Vasant Kaiwar
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004270442
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
In The Postcolonial Orient, Vasant Kaiwar analyses the formation of postcolonial studies around the 1989 moment of world history, shows its limitations via an engagement with Marxism, and provides an alternative, enriched account of interpretive possibilities inherent in the moment.

Postcolonial Moves

Postcolonial Moves PDF Author: P. Ingham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403980233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Much theoretical and historical work engaged with the question of the "postcolonial" is built upon an imagined, unified premodern "Middle Ages" in Europe. One of the results of this has been that in recent years scholars in medieval and early modern studies have been critically assessing the uses of postcolonial and subaltern theoretical perspectives in their fields, and considering what their periods have to say to postcolonial theorists. This book offers a series of original essays that explore with specificity the methodological, textual, cultural, and historiographic moves required for postcolonial engagements with premodern times.

The Cambridge Companion to the Epic

The Cambridge Companion to the Epic PDF Author: Catherine Bates
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139828274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Every great civilisation from the Bronze Age to the present day has produced epic poems. Epic poetry has always had a profound influence on other literary genres, including its own parody in the form of mock-epic. This Companion surveys over four thousand years of epic poetry from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's postcolonial Omeros. The list of epic poets analysed here includes some of the greatest writers in literary history in Europe and beyond: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Camões, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Pound, among others. Each essay, by an expert in the field, pays close attention to the way these writers have intimately influenced one another to form a distinctive and cross-cultural literary tradition. Unique in its coverage of the vast scope of that tradition, this book is an essential companion for students of literature of all kinds and in all ages.

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination PDF Author: Martin McKinsey
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838642012
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational "others." The book describes the diverse strategies they used--from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean "signifyin(g)"--to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities--Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and "part-white and Methodist"--to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the postcolonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's Omeros. Martin McKinsey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Postcolonial Plays

Postcolonial Plays PDF Author: Helen Gilbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136218246
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre. This anthology encompasses both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts, all dealing with imperialism and its aftermath. It includes work from Canada, the Carribean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand and Australia. A general introduction outlines major themes in postcolonial plays. Introductions to individual plays include information on authors as well as overviews of cultural contexts, major ideas and performance history. Dramaturgical techniques in the plays draw on Western theatre as well as local performance traditions and include agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry. The plays dramatize diverse issues, such as: *globalization * political corruption * race and class relations *slavery *gender and sexuality *media representation *nationalism