a review of international english literature a postcolonial Odyssey a review of international english literature contents (original) (raw)

Debate on Postcolonial English Novelists' Position: Rewinding the Perspective

Ideas International Journal of Literature Arts Science and Culture Volume 9, 2023

In the postcolonial realm, postcolonial English novelists are celebrated for their English novels as those represent the novelists' native subject, society and culture through a voluptuous journey from the center/ the First/ the Western World to the periphery/ the Third/ the Eastern World to the otherness/ the remote areas. Significantly, this portrayal of periphery is camouflaged with the stereotyped narrative style of the Western World with the hegemonic discoursebased ideology. Behind the celebration of the camouflaged narrative and ideology, those novelists are having an alien identity along with cultural dependency on the West because of their nurture of the English language, education, literature and culture at heart. For this, the Western educated postcolonial English novelists cannot explore his/her homeland's periphery differently with adequate focus. To hide the limitation, they end up their representation to the periphery in fantasy or silence following the typical Western structure of endeavor towards the unknown. This article scrutinizes the position of those postcolonial English novelists from former colonized lands with the reasons whether they should be identified as the successful contribution to their Third World countries' prosperity or the parasite to increase the dependency on the First World countries' mastery.

The Death of the Novel and Two Postcolonial Writers

Modern Language Quarterly, 2008

This essay, which examines the anxiety of influence of the postcolonial English-language novel, focuses on texts constituted by metropolitan (Western, European) forms of the realist novel, albeit in a reactive mode. I claim that postcolonial revisions of canonical novels reinvent the Eurocentric canon for a global age while enacting the death of the romance of the novel. The essay has three parts: the first examines V. S. Naipaul's vexed identification with and shadowing of Joseph Conrad; the second discusses J. M. Coetzee's deconstructive interpretation of the national and cultural provenance of the classic English novel; and the third explores contestations around questions of canonicity, fictionality, and the historical embeddedness of postcolonial novels.

Postcolonial Fiction: Utopia or Dystopia?

Essay for the Reconfigurating the Canon course , 2010

''For readers reared on travellers' tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands (…). But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place (…)' tells Susan Barton in J.M. Coetzee's Foe, a rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In this extract, the author re-adapts an essential feature of utopian fiction, that is, the motif of the island. Literary critic J.K Noyes argues that in the Western mentality, conquered space is recreated as a Promised Land, a utopian place that is made anew and where colonialism pervades every aspect of social life. We will then analyse the characteristic features and tropes of utopias in the works of Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966), V.S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River, 1979), Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981) and J.M. Coetzee (Foe, 1986) as related to British canons of the utopian/dystopian genre. Instead of exploring this dichotomy, these postcolonial authors favour the patterns of heteropias to emphasize the multiplicity of imagined spaces

Atlantic and Other Worlds: Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction

PMLA, 2016

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an effort to retrieve from colonial modernity the residues of premodern, often presecular modes of solidarity that persist within yet lie “athwart” the colonial-modern. The analysis focuses on novels by Barry Unsworth and Amitav Ghosh. It engages with work on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds; with theoretical critiques of utopia; and with the Lukácsian concept of typification (and Ian Baucom’s critique thereof). The essay concludes by linking the birth of postcolonial historical fiction to the form of finance capital undergirding our contemporary moment—a form of capital that reprises while intensifying that which held sway at the moment of historical fiction’s first emergence. Published in PMLA 131.5 (October 2016): 1328-1343.