Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

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.

1. Introduction. Tragedy and the maze of moments; 2. Shakespeare: Ethical cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare's Othello; 3. Chinua Achebe: History and the conscription to colonial modernity in Chinua Achebe's rural novels; 4. Wole Soyinka: Ritual dramaturgy and the social imaginary in Wole Soyinka's tragic theatre; 5. Tayeb Salih: Archetypes, self-authorship, and melancholia: Tayeb Salih's Seasons of Migration to the North; 6. Toni Morrison: Form, freedom and ethical choice in Toni Morrison's Beloved; 7. J. M. Coetzee: On moral residue and the affliction of second thoughts: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians; 8. Arundhati Roy: Enigmatic variations, language games and the arrested bildungsroman: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things; 9. Samuel Beckett: Distressed embodiment and the burdens of boredom: Samuel Beckett's Postcolonialism; 10. Conclusion: Postcolonial tragedy and the question of method.

Ato Quayson is Professor of English at Stanford University, California. He has previously taught at the University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and at New York University, and has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, Australian National University, and Wellesley College, among others.