Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres

This volume explores how postcolonial texts have determined the evolution or emergence of specific formal innovations in narrative genres. While the prominence of questions of cultural identity in postcolonial studies has prevented due attention to concerns of literary form and aesthetics, this book gives premium to the literary, aiming to delineate the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics. Essays delineate elements of an emergent postcolonial narratology across a variety of seminal generic forms, such as the epic, the novel, the short story, the autobiography, and the folk tale, focusing on genre as a powerful tool for the historicizing of literature and orature within cultural discourses. Investigating the heuristic value of concepts such as mimicry, writing back, translation, negotiation, or subversion, the book considers the value of explanatory paradigms for postcolonial generic models. It also explores the status of postcolonial comparative aesthetics versus globalization studies and liberal concepts of the transnational, taking issue with the prominence of Western concepts of identity in discussions of postcolonial literature and the favoring of mimetic forms. This volume offers a unique contribution to the study of narrative genre in postcolonial literatures and provides valuable insight into the field of postcolonial studies on the whole.

Walter Gobel is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. His main fields of interest are postcolonial theory, African American literature, and the history of the novel. He has published books on Sherwood Anderson (1982), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1993), and the twentieth-century African American novel (2001), and he has co-edited Modernization and Literature (2000), Renaissance Humanism: Modern Humanism(s) (2001), Engendering Images of Man in the Long Eighteenth-Century (2001), Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology (2006), Postcolonial (Dis)Affections (2007) and Locating Transnational Ideals (2010).

Saskia Schabio is Assistant Professor at Stuttgart University. She has written a book on Mary Wroth and has published on Montaigne, Shakespeare, and the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. Her recent work addresses the language of the emotions from a postcolonial perspective and is concerned with revisionary readings of modernity and the transnational. In these areas she has co-edited two books, Beyond the Black Atlantic (Routledge, 2006), Post-Colonial (Dis)Affections (2007) and Locating Transnational Ideals (2010).