This volume explores how postcolonial texts have determined the emergence of formal innovations in narrative genres, focusing on the literary and delineating the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics. Essays visit genre as a powerful tool for the historicizing of literature within cultural discourses.

Walter Göbel is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. His main fields of interest are postcolonial theory, African American literature, and the history of the novel. He has published books on Sherwood Anderson (1982), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1993), and the twentieth-century African American novel (2001), and he has co-edited Modernization and Literature (2000), Renaissance Humanism: Modern Humanism(s) (2001), Engendering Images of Man in the Long Eighteenth-Century (2001), Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology (2006), Postcolonial (Dis)Affections (2007) and Locating Transnational Ideals (2010).

Saskia Schabio is Assistant Professor at Stuttgart University. She has written a book on Mary Wroth and has published on Montaigne, Shakespeare, and the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. Her recent work addresses the language of the emotions from a postcolonial perspective and is concerned with revisionary readings of modernity and the transnational. In these areas she has co-edited two books, Beyond the Black Atlantic (Routledge, 2006), Post-Colonial (Dis)Affections (2007) and Locating Transnational Ideals (2010).

Introduction: Towards a Postcolonial Narrative Aesthetics Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio Part I: Pre- and Postcolonial Aesthetic Templates 1. Love, Marriage and Realism: The Novel in Pre- and Post-Colonial India Harish Trivedi 2. Post-Colonial Utopianism: The Utility of Hope Bill Ashcroft 3. "... At the Edge of Writing and Speech": Shifting Genre, Relocating the Aesthetic Saskia Schabio Part II: Resistant and Subversive Genres 4. "Writing the Poetry of Troy": Mahmoud Darwish and the Lyrical Epic as Postcolonial Resistance Genre Patrick Williams 5. Genre: Fidelity and Transgression in the Post-Colonial African Novel Mpalive-Hangson Msiska 6. "De-Formed Narrators": Postcolonial Genre and Peripheral Modernity in Mabanckou and Pepetela Sharae Deckard 7. V.S. Naipaul's Heterobiographical Fictions or Postcolonial Melancholia Reinterpreted Walter Goebel Part III: Longue Durée Perspectives and Orature 8. Folktales In(To) Postcolonial Narratives and Aesthetics Ferial Ghazoul 9. A House, a Museum, and a Legend: Bait Al-Kretliya Nadia El Kholy 10. ... What Will Count as the World: Indian Short Story Cycles and the Question of Genre Dirk Wiemann Part IV: Emerging Narrative Genres 11. Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology and Reconciliation in Recent Australian Fiction Sue Kossew 12. Remapping Territories of Fiction in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map Of Love Noha Hamdy 13. Reading Short Stories as a Postcolonialist: Jhumpa Lahiri's "This Blessed House" Renate Brosch 14. Postcolonialism and Nostalgia in Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero Georgiana Banita List of Contributors Index