Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing

ISBN-13: 9783319889238 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 200 str.

Philip Dickinson

Spis treści

1. Romanticism and Postcolonial Writing: Living Thoughts, Breathing Worlds.- 2. Walcott, Wordsworth, and the Extinction of Sense.- Countervoice I: George Lamming.- 3. Dis-enclosure: Landscape, Lyric Form, and The Enigma of Arrival.- Countervoice II: Anita Desai.- 4. White Writing and the Regime of the Sensory.- Countervoice III: J. M. Coetzee.- 5. Spivak's Imagination.

O autorze

Philip Dickinson is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and World Literature at Lancaster University, UK.

Blurb

This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically-neglected pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the white writing of South Africa, from the aesthetics of post-imperial disappointment to postcolonial theory itself, it develops an account of the textual and philosophical interpenetration of postcolonial aesthetics with Romantic ideas about sense, history and world.

What emerges is a reading of Romantic/postcolonial co-involvement that moves beyond well-worn models of intercanonical antagonism and the historicizing biases of conventional literary history. Caught somewhere between the effects of reanimation and estrangement, Romanticism appears here not as a stable textual repository prior to the postcolonial, but as echo, spectre, self-interruption, or vital force, that can yet only emerge in the guise of the afterlife, its agency mediated — but never exhausted — by postcolonial writing.