Tragedy And Postcolonial Literature

Description

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. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 2 Title - complete......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Contents......Page 8 Preface and Acknowledgments......Page 10 Chapter 1 - Introduction......Page 14 Chapter 2 - Ethical Cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare’s Othello......Page 57 Chapter 3 - History and the Conscription to Colonial Modernity in Chinua Achebe’s Rural Novels......Page 96 Chapter 4 - Ritual Dramaturgy and the Social Imaginary in Wole Soyinka’s Tragic Theatre......Page 137 Chapter 5 - Archetypes, Self-Authorship, and Melancholia......Page 169 Chapter 6 - Form, Freedom, and Ethical Choice in Toni Morrison’s Beloved......Page 199 Chapter 7 - On Moral Residue and the Affliction of Second Thoughts......Page 226 Chapter 8 - Enigmatic Variations, Language Games, and the Arrested Bildungsroman......Page 251 Chapter 9 - Distressed Embodiment and the Burdens of Boredom......Page 277 Chapter 10 - Conclusion......Page 311 Bibliography......Page 323 Index......Page 340