Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque

Based on a dialogical premise, this book provides a comparative analysis of two interrelated literary fields: postcolonial and women's/feminist, viewed through the ideological and aesthetic prism of the grotesque. The author examines the work of novelists such as Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Robert Coover and Ben Okri, selected to reveal the range and intensity of the grotesque in contemporary fiction through their de/constructions of gender and postcolonial politics. Complementary fields with the grotesque are considered through theorisations of Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva, Martha Reineke, René Girard and other intellectuals. Various literary formulations/frameworks are discussed to supplement views presented in the canonical texts of Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser: post-colonial feminine identity/alterity/exoticism; postcolonial national identity; female grotesqueness and animal metamorphosis; abjectification; the principle of sacrificial economy; mythologisations of feminine martyrdom and motherhood; religious and political tyranny associated with imperialism and re-appropriation of carnivalesque-grotesque types in postmodernity.

Auteur

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia took her doctoral degree in English Studies (Postcolonial Literatures and Contemporary fiction in English) at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in 2005.
She has been widely published and has participated in numerous domestic and international conferences, in the capacity of presenter and chair, on the topics of postcolonial and feminist literature, with a particular focus on the grotesque.
Currently she continues to co-ordinate Dicionário Terminológico de Crítica Literária Pós-Colonial/Terminological Dictionary of Postcolonial Literary Theory, which is a major joint bilingual (Portuguese/English) project involving the research group on Translation and Terminology of the University of Aveiro, Portugal and the Cultural Encounters Group of the University of Roskilde, Denmark.

Contenu

Contents: Cultural and Literary Criticism: Locations of the Grotesque - Dialogism and the Poetics of the Carnivalesque-Grotesque - Historical Overview of Grotesque Art, Literature, and Criticism - Dialogical Readings: Practices of the Grotesque - Sacrificing the Animal-Woman - Spiritual Realism or African Magical Realism: Hunger and the Supernatural in The Famished Road - In the Heart of Darkness: Travels Through a Grotesque Puppet Land in Pinocchio in Venice.