This book examines the ideological affinity that can be established between the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ and colonialist ideology on the basis of a literary analysis of ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’—considered by most critics to be the origin of the genre—and ‘Great Expectations’—one of the paradigmatic examples of the development of the Bildungsroman in English literature. This ideological affinity is understood as an example of what the Palestinian critic Edward Said has called a ‘structure of attitude and reference’: the convergence of different cultural manifestations that, although formally independent, contribute to a common purpose. The monograph also undertakes a study of the main characteristics of the classical ‘Bildungsroman’ from a formal and thematic point of view, and an analysis of the relationship between genre theories and Eurocentric discourses.

This detailed analysis of the evolution of the Bildungsroman genre is unprecedented in its historical and geographical range.

Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.

Postcolonial Naturalism proposes an innovative periodizing schema for historicizing contemporary Anglophone fiction. Engaging and revising the materialist paradigm of the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of “world-literature,” Fredric Jameson’s mapping of modernity’s cultural periods, and Christopher L. Hill’s positing of a transnational naturalism, Eric D. Smith theorizes “postcolonial naturalism” as a structurally determined cultural logic rather than as a literary technique or style. Supported by careful, theoretically and critically sophisticated analyses of exemplary literary works, this important intervention invites us to reconsider the living history of aesthetic naturalism as well as its social and political implications for the practice of world-literature in the aftermath of anticolonial resistance.

This book establishes a vector of methodology in the approach to a particular type of fictional discourse, namely the English Bildungsroman (the novel of identity formation). Its wide-ranging critical perspectives are also useful to anyone concerned with, first of all, European and English novelistic genres, but also to those interested in theoretical perspectives of modern fiction studies in general, as well as in certain aspects of Western literature as a developing tradition.

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.