Character and the Postcolonial Novel

Form, Geopolitics and the Emergence of Global Anglophone Literature
The first book to address how postcolonial novelists contest their cultural representativeness through unusual modes of literary characterisation.
Character and the Postcolonial Novel examines how writers respond to the geopolitical overdetermination of their work as postcolonial with innovations in characterisation. In particular, it charts how authors from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Caribbean deploy surprising and dissonant forms of characterisation to imaginatively contest the metropolitan (over)reading of their novels as national allegories or culturally representative texts. Through analysis of works by Mohsin Hamid, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Pankaj Mishra, Kamila Shamsie, Helon Habila, Tash Aw, Earl Lovelace and Aravind Adiga, Siddharth Srikanth demonstrates how writers redefine the referential links between character and individual, community and n