Colonial Ideology and the classical 'Bildungsroman'

Colonial Ideology and the classical 'Bildungsroman' PDF Author: José Santiago Fernández-Vázquez
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8411183602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This book examines the ideological affinity that can be established between the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ and colonialist ideology on the basis of a literary analysis of ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’—considered by most critics to be the origin of the genre—and ‘Great Expectations’—one of the paradigmatic examples of the development of the Bildungsroman in English literature. This ideological affinity is understood as an example of what the Palestinian critic Edward Said has called a ‘structure of attitude and reference’: the convergence of different cultural manifestations that, although formally independent, contribute to a common purpose. The monograph also undertakes a study of the main characteristics of the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ from a formal and thematic point of view, and an analysis of the relationship between genre theories and Eurocentric discourses.

Colonial Ideology and the classical 'Bildungsroman'

Colonial Ideology and the classical 'Bildungsroman' PDF Author: José Santiago Fernández-Vázquez
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8411183602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the ideological affinity that can be established between the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ and colonialist ideology on the basis of a literary analysis of ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’—considered by most critics to be the origin of the genre—and ‘Great Expectations’—one of the paradigmatic examples of the development of the Bildungsroman in English literature. This ideological affinity is understood as an example of what the Palestinian critic Edward Said has called a ‘structure of attitude and reference’: the convergence of different cultural manifestations that, although formally independent, contribute to a common purpose. The monograph also undertakes a study of the main characteristics of the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ from a formal and thematic point of view, and an analysis of the relationship between genre theories and Eurocentric discourses.

A Companion to African Literatures

A Companion to African Literatures PDF Author: Olakunle George
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119058171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.

A History of the Bildungsroman

A History of the Bildungsroman PDF Author: Sarah Graham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107136539
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
This detailed analysis of the evolution of the Bildungsroman genre is unprecedented in its historical and geographical range.

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing PDF Author: Andrea Fernández-García
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030201074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book is an in-depth study of Latina girls, portrayed in five coming-of-age narratives by using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. The texts under study here are Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender (2009), Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993), and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998). Unlike most representations of Latina girls, which are characterized by cultural inaccuracies, tropes of exoticism, and a tendency to associate the host society with modernity and their girls’ cultures of origin with backwardness and oppression, these texts contribute to reimagining the social differently from what the dominant imagery offers. By illustrating the vexing phenomena the characters have to negotiate on a daily basis (such as racism, sexism, and displacement), these narratives open avenues for a critical exploration of the legacies of colonial modernity. This book, therefore, not only enables an analysis of how the girls’ development is shaped by these structures of power, but also shows how such legacies are reversed as the characters negotiate their identities. It breaks with the longstanding characterization of young people, and especially Latina girls, as voiceless and deprived of agency, showing readers that this youth group also has say in controlling their lifeworlds.

Salman Rushdie and Postcolonial Authorship

Salman Rushdie and Postcolonial Authorship PDF Author: Trajanka Kortova Jovanovska
Publisher: Ethics International Press
ISBN: 180441283X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
The main focus of interest in this book are the figures of writers and writing subjects in Rushdie’s oeuvre who contemplate and reflect on the nature and purpose of their craft, their authorial identity and their positioning in society and intellectual history, though their writing. It discusses the aesthetics of the texts they produce, and their subsequent agency in the world through the various ways they are interpreted and appropriated. Authorship is a special category of storytelling; a specific craft and vocation giving expression to a conscious and purposeful project. The book focuses on what postcolonial literature specialist Dr Jane Poyner calls “the ethics of intellectual practice” as the major theme pervading Rushdie’s entire corpus of writing; fictional, essayistic and autobiographical). The key audience for the book is, primarily, students of postcolonial literature, and of Salman Rushdie’s work in particular. It will also be of interest to readers wishing to get a deep insight into the works of one of the most prominent, and most controversial, contemporary writers.

Postcolonial Naturalism

Postcolonial Naturalism PDF Author: Eric D. Smith
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835534120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Postcolonial Naturalism proposes an innovative periodizing schema for historicizing contemporary Anglophone fiction. Engaging and revising the materialist paradigm of the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of “world-literature,” Fredric Jameson’s mapping of modernity’s cultural periods, and Christopher L. Hill’s positing of a transnational naturalism, Eric D. Smith theorizes “postcolonial naturalism” as a structurally determined cultural logic rather than as a literary technique or style. Supported by careful, theoretically and critically sophisticated analyses of exemplary literary works, this important intervention invites us to reconsider the living history of aesthetic naturalism as well as its social and political implications for the practice of world-literature in the aftermath of anticolonial resistance.

Joycean Legacies

Joycean Legacies PDF Author: Martha C. Carpentier
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137503629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

A History of the Bildungsroman

A History of the Bildungsroman PDF Author: Petru Golban
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527516768
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This book establishes a vector of methodology in the approach to a particular type of fictional discourse, namely the English Bildungsroman (the novel of identity formation). Its wide-ranging critical perspectives are also useful to anyone concerned with, first of all, European and English novelistic genres, but also to those interested in theoretical perspectives of modern fiction studies in general, as well as in certain aspects of Western literature as a developing tradition.

The Amateur

The Amateur PDF Author: Saikat Majumdar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501399896
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Can ignorance, mistake, failure shape ways of reading, or do they disrupt its proper practice? What happens when the authority of modern education and culture places canonical western texts in the way of readers who live in worlds remote from their material contexts? The Amateur reads patterns of autodidactism and intellectual self-formation under systems of colonial education that are variously repressive, exclusionary, broken, or narrowly instrumental. It outlines the development of a wide range of writers, activists, and thinkers whose failed relationships with institutions of knowledge curiously enabled their later success as popular intellectuals. Bringing current debates around reading together with the history of higher education in the postcolony, it focuses on three primary locations: Black intellectuals in apartheid-era South Africa in the aftermath of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, 20th century Caribbean writers who sought to understand the disembodied legacy of the diaspora through accidental encounters with literature and history, and writers from late-colonial and postcolonial India whose disruptive self-formation departed from the administrative project of professionalizing a particular kind of colonial subject. Celebrating flawed and accidental forms of reading, writing, and learning along the periphery of the historical British Empire, Majumdar reveals an unexpected account of the humanities in the postcolony.

Formative Fictions

Formative Fictions PDF Author: Tobias Boes
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465214
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
The Bildungsroman, or "novel of formation," has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. In Formative Fictions, Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls "cosmopolitan remainders," identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. In Formative Fictions, Boes presents readings of a number of novels—Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them—that have always been felt to be particularly "German" and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.