Dissertation

Literary Cities & the Postcolonial Canon: Writing Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg in the Twentieth Century

Kruger, Liam

2023

Overview

“Literary Cities & the Postcolonial Canon: Writing Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg in the Twentieth Century” begins by asking a question about a peculiarity of the postcolonial canon: why is Things Fall Apart, a novel from 1958 set in a fictional Nigerian village, still taught and read as the paradigmatic African literary text, when half of Africa’s population has lived in cities since 2015? It seems as if canonicity’s longevity poses a problem for postcolonial writers in a way that it has not for Western writers, and that this problem is made visible by paying attention to postcolonial literary setting. But the anachronism and non-representativeness of the postcolonial canon, I argue, is not merely the material consequence of a global literary industry that sells visions of the postcolony as variously corrupt, rural, war-torn, and underdeveloped to readers based primarily in the Global North. It is also the formal consequence of the postcolonial literary field being constituted by writers developing strategies for depicting their specific geographical contexts to both local and transnational audiences; that is, the consequence of the postcolonial literary field being constituted by its postcolonial setting.Over three chapters, taking Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg as its primary sites, Literary Cities reads Irish, Nigerian, and South African novels of independence to show how postcolonial writers have negotiated their geographical and canonical peripherality through their formal handling of setting; how these negotiations get taken up by consecrating institutions nearer to the imperial metropole; and how that taking-up reshapes the meaning and longevity of these postcolonial novels within the postcolonial canon. Chapter One compares the construction of setting in James Joyce’s hypercanonical metropolitan novel, Ulysses (1922), against that of Elizabeth Bowen’s semicanonical rural novel, The Last September (1929), and demonstrates how their respective aesthetic strategies determine their canonical fortunes at home and abroad over the course of the twentieth century. Chapter Two considers Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) in terms of its canonical marginality and, paradoxically, its profound literary influence. The chapter argues that notwithstanding the novel’s tendency to cite canonical works of European modernism, its urban setting is principally produced by drawing on an emergent and vernacular tradition of detective fiction; that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life; and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe’s rural Things Fall Apart (1958) and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. Chapter Three reads the Afrikaans novelist Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994), a tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness at the end of apartheid, alongside its global reception after being translated into “international English,” and considers the causes and consequences of Van Niekerk’s work being frequently compared to that of William Faulkner. My conclusion makes explicit the genealogy being posited here across these sites and these writers, before turning to some more contemporary figures to consider the role of literary setting in the new global novel.This comprehensive study of urban setting over a century of anticolonial and postcolonial cultural production offers translatable interpretive methodologies for literary and cultural studies, a firm grounding in the cultural and material histories of Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg, and a robust theorisation of the relationships between literary form, literary institutions, and the material conditions of the postcolony.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: African literature / British & Irish literature / British and Irish literature / Comparative literature / English literature
• ISBN: 9798379847159