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Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

Martin McKinse

This book follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational 'others.' The book describes the diverse strategies they used — from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean 'signifyin(g)' — to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities — Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and 'part-white and Methodist' — to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the post-colonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's "Omeros."

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 223 •

978-1-61147-482-4 • Hardback • July 2010 • $107.00 • (£82.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Books & Reading, Literary Criticism / Poetry, Literary Criticism / Reference, Poetry / General, Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

Hardback

Summary

This book follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational 'others.' The book describes the diverse strategies they used — from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean 'signifyin(g)' — to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities — Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and 'part-white and Methodist' — to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the post-colonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's "Omeros."

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 223 •

978-1-61147-482-4 • Hardback • July 2010 • $107.00 • (£82.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Books & Reading, Literary Criticism / Poetry, Literary Criticism / Reference, Poetry / General, Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Author

Martin McKinsey is associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He has a PhD in literature from the University of Virginia and an MA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. His articles on modern poetry have appeared in journals like Ariel, Callaloo, Twentieth Century Literature, and Yale Journal of Criticism. He is a prize-winning translator from modern Greek.

Reviews

Martin McKinsey's Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination is an energetic comparative reading of three very different poets, each occupying a peculiar position with respect to the cultural and political center of the British Empire.
— JPN Reviews

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

Martin McKinse

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

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