Postcolonial Naturalism Periodization, World-Literature, and the Anglophone Novel

Postcolonial Naturalism proposes an innovative periodizing schema for historicizing contemporary Anglophone fiction. Engaging and revising the materialist paradigm of the Warwick Research Collective's concept of "world-literature," Fredric Jameson's mapping of modernity's cultural periods, and Christopher L. Hill's positing of a transnational naturalism, Eric D. Smith theorizes "postcolonial naturalism" as a structurally determined cultural logic rather than as a literary technique or style. Supported by careful, theoretically and critically sophisticated analyses of exemplary literary works, this important intervention invites us to reconsider the living history of aesthetic naturalism as well as its social and political implications for the practice of world-literature in the aftermath of anticolonial resistance.

Introduction. Naturalism, Postcolonialism, and World-Literature

Chapter 1. Narrative Desolation and The Impulse-Image in V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas

Chapter 2. Neither Us Nor Ours: The Dialectic of Hysteria and the Beautiful Soul in the Novels of Lewis Nkosi

Chapter 3. Heredity and Horizon in the Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Rhys, Cliff, and Adiga

Chapter 4. Future Perfect and the Impossible Present: Two Faces of Postcolonial Anti-Utopianism

Conclusion. Naturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Capital in Crisis