Postcolonial literature and the Western literary canon

Abstract

In this chapter, I describe how the novels, poems, and plays that scholars and common readers have come to recognize as postcolonial relate to texts likely to be included in a Western canon. To be precise, I identify three sorts of relationships between postcolonial literature and this canon. Two of these have taken on the quality of scholarly common sense and will be familiar to non-specialists. First, postcolonial writing is held to repudiate the canon. Accordingly, readers have become well practiced in treating work from Europe's former colonies as the antithesis of canonical writing and as an instrumental component in efforts to recover oral and print traditions that imperialism threatened to obliterate. Second, postcolonial literature has been shown to revise canonical texts and concepts. Readers have learned to approach postcolonial literature as a critique of Western tradition involving the rewriting of specific works ( The Tempest and Heart of Darkness , for instance) and the appropriation of entire genres (the Bildungsroman , for example, or the domestic romance).