Postcolonial Epic

Sneharika Roy is Assistant Professor of Comparative and English Literature at the American University of Paris, France. Her research focuses on comparative approaches to epic that bridge classical and postcolonial theory and literatures. She is a contributor to the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh and to the French encyclopaedic project Dictionnaire des litteratures indiennes (Dictionary of Indian Literatures).

‘A brilliant cross-cultural reading of epic, which wrests the genre from its classical origins to demonstrate how its contemporary postcolonial incarnations unsettle the essentialist notions of nation inherent in earlier conceptions of the form. Roy’s study is also a major contribution to scholarship on Melville, Walcott and Ghosh.’ John Thieme, Professor, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, UK‘The Postcolonial Epic makes an essential contribution to the study of world literature but more than that its careful and in-depth presentation of the sea-borne epic, ancient and modern, American, Caribbean, and Indian, imperial, national, and postcolonial, in theory and in practice, increases our understanding of literature itself, how it works and what it can do.’Neil Ten Kortenaar, Professor and Director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada

• Acknowledgements. Introduction: From Classical to Postcolonial Epic 1. Rallying the Tropes: The Language of Violence and the Violence of Language 2. ‘History in the Future Tense’: Genealogy as Prophecy 3. ‘The Artifice of Eternity’: Ekphrasis as ‘An-other’ Epic 4. Conclusion: Resistant Nostalgia. Bibliography. Index