Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York in the UK and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He co-edited and conducted the interviews for J.M. Coetzee’s Doubling the Point Essays and Interviews. His monographs include J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing; Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History; and most recently, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing.

Annalisa Pes is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Verona. Besides articles and book chapters, her publications include: Ex-centric Writing. Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction (co-ed.), Sermoni, amori e misteri. Il racconto coloniale australiano al femminile, and Stories that Keep on Rising to the Surface. I racconti di Patrick White.

Susanna Zinato is Associate Professor of English at the University of Verona. Besides articles and book chapters, her publications include: The house is empty: Grammars of Madness in J. Frame’s Scented Gardens for the Blind and B. Head’s A Question of Power; Rehearsals of the Modern: Experience and Experiment in Restoration Drama (ed.); Ex-centric Writing: Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction (co-ed.).