Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Hardback)

Beskrivelser af Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature

Forlagets beskrivelse

Via readings of novels by J.M. Coetzee, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie and the later poetry of W.B. Yeats, this book reveals how postcolonial writing can encourage the enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility needed to supplant ongoing forms of imperial violence with cosmopolitan institutions, relationships and ways of thinking.

Bibliotekernes beskrivelse

This book represents a new direction in postcolonial literary criticism that adds to the well-known narrative of what postcolonial criticism is, against an equally forceful account of what it is actually for. Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature shows how postcolonial literary texts, largely through the relationships that they engineer with their readers, can encourage dispositions and practices that deserve to be called cosmopolitan; that are characterised, in other words, by self-awareness, by a penetrating sensitivity to the world beyond one's immediate milieu, and by an enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility. The book formulates and then demonstrates a new literary critical approach that is alert to the ways in which postcolonial writing makes available for scrutiny the durability of imperial violence as well as the latency and desirability of cosmopolitan alternatives. The task of the cosmopolitan critic is therefore, in Yeats's felicitous phrase, 'to hold in a single thought reality and justice'.