Overview

Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature. Contributors: David Babcock, Sarah Brouillette, Gregory Byala, Deena Dinat, Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, José-Santiago Fernández-Vázquez, Ericka A. Hoagland, Elizabeth Jackson, Feroza Jussawala, Andrew David King, Aruna Krishnamurthy, Simone Maria Puleo, Peter Ribic, Arnab Dutta Roy, Craig Smith, Antonette Talaue-Arogo, Paul Ugor, Julieann Veronica Ulin, Rachel Ann Walsh, Maria Su Wang, Bethany Williamson, Helena Wu, Julia Wurr.

Full Product Details

9781772127706

Table of Contents

Reviews

""The Postcolonial Bildungsroman brings together multi-valent and diverse contexts to consolidate a new conceptualization of the Bildungsroman, reading its postcoloniality in innovative ways."" Christopher Ouma, Duke University ""This collection presents the voices of postcolonial and diasporic writers on contemporary critical discussions of identity, especially racialized, gendered, and sexual identities, through the lens of Bildungsroman."" Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto Scarborough

Author Information

Arnab Dutta Roy teaches postcolonial theory and modern world literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Paul Ugor teaches modern African literature and cinema and postcolonial world literatures at the University of Waterloo.

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