Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque
Texts of Contemporary Excess
Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Published:25th Feb '11
Should be back in stock very soon
Based on a dialogical premise, this book provides a comparative analysis of two interrelated literary fields: postcolonial and women’s/feminist, viewed through the ideological and aesthetic prism of the grotesque. The author examines the work of novelists such as Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Robert Coover and Ben Okri, selected to reveal the range and intensity of the grotesque in contemporary fiction through their de/constructions of gender and postcolonial politics.
Complementary fields with the grotesque are considered through theorisations of Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva, Martha Reineke, René Girard and other intellectuals. Various literary formulations/frameworks are discussed to supplement views presented in the canonical texts of Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser: post-colonial feminine identity/alterity/exoticism; postcolonial national identity; female grotesqueness and animal metamorphosis; abjectification; the principle of sacrificial economy; mythologisations of feminine martyrdom and motherhood; religious and political tyranny associated with imperialism and re-appropriation of carnivalesque-grotesque types in postmodernity.
ISBN: 9783034305983
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 670g
456 pages
New edition