The Postcolonial Bildungsroman

Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature.

Contributors: David Babcock, Sarah Brouillette, Gregory Byala, Deena Dinat, Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, José-Santiago Fernández-Vázquez, Ericka A. Hoagland, Elizabeth Jackson, Feroza Jussawala, Andrew David King, Aruna Krishnamurthy, Simone Maria Puleo, Peter Ribic, Arnab Dutta Roy, Craig Smith, Antonette Talaue-Arogo, Paul Ugor, Julieann Veronica Ulin, Rachel Ann Walsh, Maria Su Wang, Bethany Williamson, Helena Wu, Julia Wurr. Highlights how the Bildungsroman is reimagined by writers from a wide range of formerly colonized regions across the globe. Highlights how the Bildungsroman is reimagined by writers from a wide range of formerly colonized regions across the globe. Index
"The Postcolonial Bildungsroman brings together multi-valent and diverse contexts to consolidate a new conceptualization of the Bildungsroman, reading its postcoloniality in innovative ways." Christopher Ouma, Duke University "This collection presents the voices of postcolonial and diasporic writers on contemporary critical discussions of identity, especially racialized, gendered, and sexual identities, through the lens of Bildungsroman." Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto Scarborough
"The Postcolonial Bildungsroman addresses a notable gap in scholarship and is essential reading for anyone interested in coming-of-age narratives and the afterlives of genres. By demonstrating the disparate ways that writers from around the world have deployed the Bildungsroman to interrogate imperialism, channel political resistance, and seek historical redress, the volume facilitates a capacious and dynamic understanding of what is sometimes mischaracterized as an outdated genre. Roy and Ugor convincingly show that the Bildungsroman is a timely, urgent vehicle for reimagining postcolonial futures." Sarah L. Townsend, co-editor of The Irish Bildungsroman
"The Postcolonial Bildungsroman examines how a canonical genre, showcasing personality development and artistic autonomy in the mould of European Romantic nationalisms and empire building, became global: not a top-down manual for social mobility but primers coming from below. This multi-faceted collaborative volume ably develops the aesthetic and political dimensions of the postcolonial invention of the bildungsroman. These include the anti-colonial ideologies underpinning this repurposed genre; a new cast and complexion of protagonists drawn from the ranks of the colonised, marginalised, and the oppressed; the quests for serviceable form to enshrine emerging narratives of indigenous selfhood. The two key strengths of this work lie in Roy and Ugor's refocusing of postcolonial literary studies on questions of form and genre, not simply thematic content, and in the way they have troubled and expanded the very definition of 'postcolonial' by orchestrating dissimilar critical perspectives on literatur