Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization | Exploiting Eden

Sharae Deckard

ISBN 10: 1138820814 / ISBN 13: 9781138820814

Published by Routledge, 2014

About this Item

Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization | Exploiting Eden | Sharae Deckard | Taschenbuch | Einband - flex.(Paperback) | Englisch | 2014 | Routledge | EAN 9781138820814 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld, gpsr[at]libri[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu Print on Demand.

Seller Inventory # 127149426

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization | Exploiting Eden
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1138820814
• ISBN 13: 9781138820814
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 229W x 152H x 14D millimeters 229 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 14 millimeters depth
• Weight: 388 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Bücher

About this title

Synopsis

This comparative study, the first of its kind, discusses paradise discourse in a wide range of writing from Mexico, Zanzibar, and Sri Lanka, including novels by authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. Tracing dialectical tropes of paradise across the "long modernity" of the capitalist world-system, Deckard reads literature from postcolonial nations in context with colonial discourse in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a topos motivating European exploration and colonization, shifts into an ideological myth justifying imperial exploitation, and finally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary writers to critique neocolonial representations and conditions in the age of globalization.

Combining a range of critical perspectives―cultural materialist, ecocritical, and postcolonial―the volume opens up a deeper understanding of the relation between paradise discourse and the destructive dynamics of plantation, tourism, and global capital. Deckard uncovers literature from East Africa and South Asia which has been previously overlooked in mainstream postcolonial criticism, and gestures to how the utopian dimensions of the paradise myth might be reclaimed to promote cultural resistance.

About the Author

Sharae Deckard is a Lecturer in World Literature at the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin.