Research Catalog

Title

Cosmopolitan criticism and postcolonial literature / Robert Spencer.

Author

Spencer, Robert, 1977-

Publication

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

ix, 228 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

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'.

Subject

• LITERARY CRITICISM / General
• LITERARY CRITICISM / Middle Eastern
• LITERARY CRITICISM / African
• LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
• Cosmopolitanism in literature
• Postcolonialism in literature
• Imperialism in literature
• Cosmopolitanism in literature
• Imperialism in literature
• Postcolonialism in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-222) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Sound Upon Silence -- Competing Cosmopolitanisms -- Cosmopolitan Criticism -- Late Yeats: 'Beating upon the Wall of the Irish Free State' -- J.M. Coetzee and the 'War on Terror' -- Refuse to Choose, or, How to Read The Satanic Verses -- 'Listening for the Echo': Representation and Resistance in Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage.

ISBN

• 9780230231665 (hardback)
• 0230231667 (hardback)

LCCN

^^2011008059

OCLC

• 698330377
• SCSB-10673040

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library