Postcolonial literature has often tended to invite readings that focus on the relation between texts and political contexts. However, critics have argued for attention to the literary as literary, and have explored the ways in which literary representation makes any assumed ideological content necessarily indeterminate. Taking into account this call for attention to the literary, this volume investigates more specifically the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics, including postcolonial literature's use of and experimentation with genre and form. However, this attention to poetics is not inte ... More

Postcolonial literature has often tended to invite readings that focus on the relation between texts and political contexts. However, critics have argued for attention to the literary as literary, and have explored the ways in which literary representation makes any assumed ideological content necessarily indeterminate. Taking into account this call for attention to the literary, this volume investigates more specifically the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics, including postcolonial literature's use of and experimentation with genre and form. However, this attention to poetics is not intended to replace political engagement, and, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, this volume analyses how texts use genre and form to offer multiple distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. Postcolonial texts engage with the political world in a variety of ways, and it is in their specific uses of genre and form that they alter or develop our understanding of the particular contexts with which they grapple.