What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Mukherjee, Ankhi

ISBN 10: 080478521X / ISBN 13: 9780804785211

Published by Stanford University Press, 2013

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Cultural Memory in the Present)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080478521X
• ISBN 13: 9780804785211
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New
• Weight: 18 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Ankhi Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.

About the Author

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of Wadham College. She is the author of Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007).