Postcolonial Epic

<p>This book demonstrates the epic genre’s enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic the ‘postcolonial epic’ ushered in by Herman Melville’s <i>Moby Dick</i> a foundational text of North America and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece <i>Omeros </i>and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga the <i>Ibis </i>trilogy.</p><p>The work focuses on the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville Walcott and Ghosh the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of ‘political epic’ where an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s ‘pure’ origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from ‘other’ cultures.</p><p>An important intervention in literary studies this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies especially South Asian and Caribbean literature Global South studies transnational studies and cultural studies.</p>