Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

Ato Quayson (Stanford University, California)

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English

Cambridge University Press
29 May 2025

Literary theory; Literary studies: classical, early & medieval; Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Shakespeare studies & criticism

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.

By: Ato Quayson (Stanford University California)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Weight: 565g
ISBN: 9781108926195
ISBN 10: 1108926193
Pages: 346
Publication Date: 29 May 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

'… [This book] is a powerful insight, suggestive enough, one would have thought, to fuel a book-length inquiry into the distinctiveness of postcolonial tragedy.' Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Modern Philology 'The book's connections to the fields of literature, philosophy, and history are apparent, as is its layered, meticulously crafted thesis. Relevant and applicable to a variety of critical reassessments in various fields within the humanities. Recommended.' J. Neal, Choice 'The contribution of Ato Quayson's book is undoubtedly found in the dialogue and the pooling of plural knowledge, reporting on the suffering and ethnic discriminations of which colonized populations have been victims.' Jean Zaganiaris, Anabases (translated from French) Jean