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

Arnab Roy, "The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions"
English | ISBN: 1772127701 | 2025 | 568 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine 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 engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents,