Baidik Bhattacharya

In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, this book argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters

This book explores the debates surrounding two dynamic fields – postcolonial studies and world literature. Contrary to many dominant narratives in critical theory, it asserts that as an analytical framework the idea of world literature is dead: the nineteenth-century ideal of world literature had always and already been embedded in colonial histories; and also because whatever promise that ideal held out has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone literature. Through fresh and incisive readings of the postcolonial canon and some of its most prominent authors like Rudyard Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the volume discusses how these Anglophone writings have used the banal and ordinary ideal of world literature to fashion out their own trajectories. Ambitious in scope, this book challenges many of the existing theoretical and literary frameworks and offers a radical reimagination of the fields. The volume, written in an accessible and lively prose, will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, critical theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Texts, Territories, Globalizations

Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature

Neelam Srivastava

The importance of Antonio Gramsci’s work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national—a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.

Baidik Bhattacharya

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