Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing [electronic resource] /
Dickinson, Philip.author.
This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically-neglected pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the white writing of South Africa, from the aesthetics of post-imperial disappointment to postcolonial theory itself, it develops an account of the textual and philosophical interpenetration of postcolonial aesthetics with Romantic ideas about sense, history and world. What emerges is a reading of Romantic/postcolonial co-involvement that moves beyond well-worn models of intercanonical antagonism and the historicizing biases of conventional literary history. Caught somewhere between the effects of reanimation and estrangement, Romanticism appears here not as a stable textual repository prior to the postcolonial, but as echo, spectre, self-interruption, or vital force, that can yet only emerge in the guise of the afterlife, its agency mediated - but never exhausted - by postcolonial writing.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Romanticism and Postcolonial Writing: Living Thoughts, Breathing Worlds -- 2. Walcott, Wordsworth, and the Extinction of Sense -- Countervoice I: George Lamming -- 3. Dis-enclosure: Landscape, Lyric Form, and The Enigma of Arrival -- Countervoice II: Anita Desai -- 4. White Writing and the Regime of the Sensory -- Countervoice III: J. M. Coetzee -- 5. Spivak's Imagination.
This book explores Romanticism as a force that exerts an insistent but critically-neglected pressure on the postcolonial imagination. From the decolonizing poetics of the Caribbean to the white writing of South Africa, from the aesthetics of post-imperial disappointment to postcolonial theory itself, it develops an account of the textual and philosophical interpenetration of postcolonial aesthetics with Romantic ideas about sense, history and world. What emerges is a reading of Romantic/postcolonial co-involvement that moves beyond well-worn models of intercanonical antagonism and the historicizing biases of conventional literary history. Caught somewhere between the effects of reanimation and estrangement, Romanticism appears here not as a stable textual repository prior to the postcolonial, but as echo, spectre, self-interruption, or vital force, that can yet only emerge in the guise of the afterlife, its agency mediated - but never exhausted - by postcolonial writing.
Literature   .
Comparative literature.
Literature, Modern-20th century.
Literature, Modern-18th century.
Postcolonial/World Literature.
Comparative Literature.
Contemporary Literature.
Eighteenth-Century Literature.