Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781108926195)

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.

Author: Ato Quayson
ISBN-10: 1108926193
ISBN-13: 9781108926195
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/29/2025
Pages: 346
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.78d