LIT274   The Postcolonial Bildungsroman   (20 credits)

Description

This module considers the bildungsroman as a global form that, having emerged in tandem with Western imperialism, remains a vital means of constructing the self and (re)imagining social and political relations in postcolonial literatures. We will focus on the representation of growth, development and community in novels from South Asia, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, paying attention to features that are, arguably, anti-developmental, including primitivism, animality, violence, illness and disability. We will investigate how 'postcolonial' or 'global' novels stretch, resist or overhaul, an inherited form and ask how contemporary concerns with race, gender and religious conflict play out for protagonists in whose lives the local and the global meet.

Reading List