This volume explores how postcolonial texts have determined the evolution or emergence of specific formal innovations in narrative genres. While the prominence of questions of cultural identity in postcolonial studies has prevented due attention to concerns of literary form and aesthetics, this book gives premium to the literary, aiming to delineate the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics. Essays delineate elements of an emergent postcolonial narratology across a variety of seminal generic forms, such as the epic, the novel, the short story, the autobiography, and the folk tale, focusing on genre as a powerful tool for the historicizing of literature and orature within cultural discourses. Investigating the heuristic value of concepts such as mimicry, writing back, translation, negotiation, or subversion, the book considers the value of explanatory paradigms for postcolonial generic models. It also explores the status of postcolonial comparative aesthetics versus globalization studies and liberal concepts of the transnational, taking issue with the prominence of Western concepts of identity in discussions of postcolonial literature and the favoring of mimetic forms. This volume offers a unique contribution to the study of narrative genre in postcolonial literatures and provides valuable insight into the field of postcolonial studies on the whole.

Contents

Introduction Saskia Schabio and Walter Goebel Part I: Framing Postcolonial Aesthetics 1. Post-Colonial Utopianism: The Utility of Hope Bill Ashcroft 2. Shifting Genre, Relocating the Aesthetic: Caribbean Inflections of Utopian Thinking Saskia Schabio 3. Writing the Poetry of Troy: Mahmoud Darwish and the Lyrical Epic as Postcolonial Resistance Genre Patrick Williams Part II: Resistant and Intercultural Genres 4. Genre: Fidelity and Transgression in the Post-Colonial African Novel Mpalive Hangson Msiska 5. De-Formed Narrators: Postcolonial Genre and Peripheral Modernity in Mabanckouetela Sharae Deckard 6. V.S. Naipaul’s Truncated Autobiographical Fictions Walter Goebel Part III: Longue Durée Perspectives and Orature 7. Folk Tales in(to) Postcolonial Narratives and Aesthetics Ferial Ghazoul 8. A House, a Museum, and a Legend: Bait al-Kretliya Nadia El Kholy 9. … What Will Count as the World: Indian Short Story Cycles and the Question of Genre Dirk Wiemann Part IV: Emerging Narrative Genres 10. Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology and Reconciliation in Recent Australian Fiction Sue Kossew 11. Remapping Territories of Fiction in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love Noha Hamdy 12. Reading Short Story as a Postcolonialist: ‘This Blessed House’ of Post-colonial Criticism Renate Brosch 13. Postcolonialism and Nostalgia in Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero Georgiana Banita

Author Bio

Walter Göbel is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. His main fields of interest are postcolonial theory, African Ameri...