Description
Book SynopsisPostcolonial literature has often tended to invite readings that focus on the relation between texts and political contexts, not surprisingly perhaps, given the fraught historical moments of colonialism and decolonisation with which it frequently engages. Nevertheless, critics such as Nicholas Harrison have argued for attention to the literary as literary, and have explored the ways in which literary representation makes any assumed ideological content necessarily indeterminate. Taking into account this call for attention to the literary, this volume investigates more specifically the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics, including postcolonial literature’s use of and experimentation with genre and form. However, this attention to poetics is not intended to replace political engagement, and, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, this volume analyses how texts use genre and form to offer multiple distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. Postcolonial texts engage with the political world in a variety of ways, directly or indirectly, and it is in their specific uses of genre and form that they alter or develop our understanding of the particular contexts with which they grapple. According to Graham Huggan, postcolonial studies is inherently plural and interdisciplinary, in that it is made up of literary and cultural analysis as well as political theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history and philosophy. It is in the combination and manipulation of such forms of analysis that postcolonialism is able to imagine alternative identities and societies. This volume of postcolonial poetics therefore probes some examples of different kinds of literary writing, its blurring with other discourses and its manipulation of genre and form, in order to achieve a better understanding of its transformatory power.This exploration of the poetics of genre also sheds light on how different kinds of texts offer specific, distinct modes of thought.
Trade Review... this book will provide a key reference point for researchers embarking on analyses of postcolonial cultural production.
Gillian Jein, French Studies, vol 67, no 1Table of ContentsPreface - Dominique Combe Acknowledgements Introduction - Jane Hiddleston Literary Form and the Politics of Interpretation 'New World' Exiles and Ironists from Evariste Parny to Ananda Devi - Framcoise Lionnet ''... without losing sight of the whole': Said and Goethe - Matthias Zach Metaphorical Memories: Freud, Conrad and the Dark Continent - Nicholas Harrison Playing the Field/Performing 'the Personal' in Maryse Conde's Interviews - Eva Sansavior Writing Subjectivity, Crossing Borders A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre - Bart Moore-Gilbert Still Beseiged by Voices: Djebar's Poetics of the Threshold - Clarisse Zimra Algerian Letters: Mixture, Genres, Literature Itself - Patrick Crowley Postcolonial Poetics How to Speak about It? Kateb Yacine's Feminine Voice or Literat Wager: A Reading of Nedjma - Mireille Calle-Gruber (translated by lane Hiddlestor. The Rise of the recit d'enfance in the Francophone Caribbean - Louise Hardwick Reinventing the Legacies of Genre The Tragedy of Decolonization: Dialectics at a Standstill - Martin Megevand J. M. Coetzee's Australian Realism - Elleke Boehmer Ambivalence and Ambiguity of the Short Story in Albert Camus's 'L'H6te' and Mohammed Dib's 'La Fin' - Andy Stafford Writing against Genocide: Genres of Opposition in Narratives fror and about Rwanda - Zoe Norridge Notes on Contributors Index
