Romanticism And Aesthetic Life In Postcolonial Writing

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.

Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance describes the production of a new and particular kind of postcolonial text and resituates the notion of literary influence in the context of postcolonial literatures. This book addresses the ways in which Derek Walcott, Garrett Hongo, and Jamaica Kincaid have appropriated aspects of «colonial» culture and how they deploy the tropes of British Romanticism in their own texts. Postcolonial Romanticisms argues that Walcott, Hongo, and Kincaid radically reimagine and rewrite the various traditions that have figured their island landscapes as unhistoricized, unoccupied, and marginal. The landscapes that they write about are necessarily politicized; their own subjectivities are intimately implicated in both the natural beauty as well as the traumatic history of place; they confront and engage to varying degrees the history of their postcolonial geographies, the history of diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist commodification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on the individual. These postcolonial writers confront what Derek Walcott calls the «shards of an ancient pastoral», the literal and literary remains of colonial cultural authority that clutter their landscapes. Postcolonial Romanticisms is ideally suited for courses in cultural, literary, and postcolonial studies, specifically courses in world literature, global literature, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary poetry, and eco-literary studies.

Comparative Postcolonialism in the Works of V.S. Naipaul and Toni Morrison: Fragmented Identities places comparative literature in a postcolonial context in order to widen its traditional scope and thereby pay greater attention to the relationship between indigenous and hegemonic cultures.

The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

This book examines the relationship between Romantic writing and the rapidly expanding British Empire. Literature played a crucial role in constructing and contesting the modern culture of empire that was fully in place by the start of the Victorian period. Postcolonial criticism's concern with issues of geopolitics, race and gender, subalternity and exoticism shape discussions of works by major authors such as Blake, Coleridge, both Shelleys, Austen and Scott, as well as their less familiar contemporaries.

Taking into account key movements, such as late 19th century aestheticism, early 20th century Modernism, postmodernism and post-colonialism, the book shows how these developments were not only informed by Romanticism, but also revealed it to be a more plural and less stable concept.

Demonstrates the importance of postcolonial approaches to understanding the literature of the period 1787-1833. Arguing that literature of the Romantic period must be understood in the context of British colonial expansion and imperial rule, this text surveys Romantic literature's role in consolidating Britain as the centre of empire. It highlights the ways in which the expanding print market served readers eager to learn about the wider world: Romantic poetry and travel writing, for example, went hand in hand. Elizabeth Bohls shows that while Exoticism and Orientalism help us understand colon.

This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical contention for these Irish, Welsh, and Scottish poets, and it relates this engagement to wider concerns with gender, nation, and nature which have shaped contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Covering a substantial number of works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the book discusses how Boland and Clarke, as women poets from the Republic of Ireland and Wales, react to a male-dominated and Anglocentric lyric tradition and thus rework notions of the Romantic. It examines how Burnside and Jamie challenge, adopt, and revise Romantic aesthetics of nature and environment. The book is the first in-depth study to read Boland, Clarke, Burnside, and Jamie as post-Romantics. By disentangling the aesthetic and critical conceptions of Romanticism which inform their inheritance, it develops an innovative approach to the understanding of contemporary poetry and literary influence.