{"id":2176,"date":"2018-02-22T17:01:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T16:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/?p=2176"},"modified":"2018-02-22T17:01:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T16:01:00","slug":"book-announcement-the-postcolonial-epic-from-melville-to-walcott-and-ghosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/blog\/book-announcement-the-postcolonial-epic-from-melville-to-walcott-and-ghosh\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Announcement: The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sneharika Roy, The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh<\/em><\/h1>\n

The book
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Bridging classical and contemporary scholarship,\u00a0The Postcolonial Epic<\/em>\u00a0places the epic, a form traditionally marginalised in postcolonial criticism, at the heart of the post-imperial construction of the imagined community. It introduces two major comparative concepts\u2014political epic and postcolonial epic\u2014in order to re-evaluate the post-Hegelian conception of epic as a discursively stable expression of the national totality. The political epics of Valmiki, Virgil, and their successors are recast as more unsettled entities, in which an avowed national politics promoting a culture\u2019s \u201cpure\u201d origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from \u201cother\u201d cultures. This paradox allows the book\u2019s chiasmatic argument to come into view: while political epic employs a hybrid poetics of migration to express a monocultural politics of nation (a contradiction it must disavow), postcolonial epic allows the genre to come full circle. It deploys a migrating poetics of intertextuality to articulate a transnational politics of migration (a complementary homology it openly advertises).<\/p>\n

Prefigured by Herman Melville\u2019s\u00a0Moby Dick<\/em>\u00a0and exemplified by the works of Derek Walcott and Amitav Ghosh, postcolonial epic compounds the tensions\u00a0already<\/em>\u00a0present in political epic and makes the tradition more amenable to contemporary explorations of the profoundly disruptive nature of colonialism.\u00a0The Postcolonial Epic<\/em>\u00a0foregrounds key postcolonial developments in the genre, including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation.<\/p>\n

The table of contents
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Introduction: from classical to postcolonial epic<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language<\/li>\n
  2. \u201cHistory in the future tense\u201d: genealogy as prophecy<\/li>\n
  3. \u201cThe artifice of eternity\u201d: ekphrasis as \u201can-other\u201d epic<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Conclusion: resistant nostalgia<\/p>\n

    The author
    \n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    Sneharika Roy<\/strong> is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris. She is a contributor to MLA volume on\u00a0Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh<\/em>\u00a0and to the encyclopedic project DELI (Dictionnaire<\/em>\u00a0Encyclop\u00e9dique des<\/em>\u00a0Litt\u00e9ratures<\/em>\u00a0de l’Inde<\/em>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Sneharika Roy, The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh The book Bridging classical and contemporary scholarship,\u00a0The Postcolonial Epic\u00a0places the epic, a form traditionally marginalised in postcolonial criticism, at the heart of the post-imperial construction of the imagined community. It introduces two major comparative concepts\u2014political epic and postcolonial epic\u2014in order to re-evaluate the post-Hegelian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2182,"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions\/2182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essenglish.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}