Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature
Cambridge University Press, 1/21/2021
EAN 9781108830980, ISBN10: 1108830986
Hardcover, 346 pages, 22.9 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.
1. Introduction. Tragedy and the maze of moments
2. Shakespeare
Ethical cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare's Othello
3. Chinua Achebe
History and the conscription to colonial modernity in Chinua Achebe's rural novels
4. Wole Soyinka
Ritual dramaturgy and the social imaginary in Wole Soyinka's tragic theatre
5. Tayeb Salih
Archetypes, self-authorship, and melancholia
Tayeb Salih's Seasons of Migration to the North
6. Toni Morrison
Form, freedom and ethical choice in Toni Morrison's Beloved
7. J. M. Coetzee
On moral residue and the affliction of second thoughts
J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
8. Arundhati Roy
Enigmatic variations, language games and the arrested bildungsroman
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
9. Samuel Beckett
Distressed embodiment and the burdens of boredom
Samuel Beckett's Postcolonialism
10. Conclusion
Postcolonial tragedy and the question of method.