The Postcolonial Bildungsroman : Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions

Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to express local concerns around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. If literature is the crucial site where people find the language to convey their social experiences, this book reveals how the Bildungsroman now functions in the global world of letters to capture and bear witness to young people’s varied interactions and responses to both local and global forces enveloping and shaping their lives. Chapters explore identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive scholarly engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman in the past two centuries, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the global south. With a very diverse array of essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature.

Contributors: David Babcock, Sarah Brouillette, Gregory Byala, Deena Dinat, Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, José-Santiago Fernández-Vázquez, Ericka A. Hoagland, Elizabeth Jackson, Feroza Jussawala, Andrew David King, Aruna Krishnamurthy, Simone Puleo, Peter Ribic, Arnab Dutta Roy, Craig Smith, Antonette Talaue-Arogo, Paul Ugor, Julieann, Veronica Ulin, Rachel Ann Walsh, Maria Su Wang, Bethany Williamson, Helena Wu, Julia Wurr.