Postcolonial realism and the concept of the political:

As the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naive, anachronistic, deceptive, or co...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sorensen, Eli Park 1979- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: London, New York Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd 2021
Series:Routledge studies in twentieth-century literature
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Summary:As the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naive, anachronistic, deceptive, or complicit with colonial discourse; in other words-incongruous with the postcolonial. This book argues that postcolonial realism is intimately connected to the specifically political in the sense that realist form is premised on the idea of a collective reality. Discussing a range of literary and theoretical works, Dr. Sorensen exemplifies that many postcolonial writers were often faced with the realities of an unstable state, a divided community inhabiting a contested social space, the challenges of constructing a notion of 'the people,' often out of a myriad of local communities with different traditions and languages brought together arbitrarily through colonization. The book demonstrates that the political context of realism is the sphere or possibility of civil war, divided societies, and unstable communities. Postcolonial realism is prompted by disturbing political circumstances, and it gestures toward a commonly imagined world, precisely because such a notion is under pressure or absent
Physical Description:196 Seiten Breite 152 mm, Hoehe 229 mm
ISBN:9780367650803
9780367650780