What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Cultural Memory in the Present)

"What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. The breadth of debates and politics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes the literatures of five continents, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today."--Page [4] of cover.