The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh

ISBN-13: 9781138063631 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 208 str.

Sneharika Roy

Opis

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. It focuses on the genre’s potential to articulate post-imperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North–South. It foregrounds the genre’s postcolonial shifts from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the preoccupation with language and representation.

 

Spis treści

Acknowledgements.  Introduction: From Classical to Postcolonial Epic  1. Rallying the Tropes: The Language of Violence and the Violence of Language  2. ‘History in the Future Tense’: Genealogy as Prophecy  3. ‘The Artifice of Eternity’: Ekphrasis as ‘An-other’ Epic  4. Conclusion: Resistant Nostalgia.  Bibliography.  Index

O autorze

Sneharika Roy is Assistant Professor of Comparative and English Literature at the American University of Paris, France. Her research focuses on comparative approaches to epic that bridge classical and postcolonial theory and literatures. She is a contributor to the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh and to the French encyclopaedic project Dictionnaire des litteratures indiennes (Dictionary of Indian Literatures).