Postcolonializing the Bildungsroman: A study of the evolution of a genre

Ericka A Hoagland, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine how a Western-based genre, the Bildungsroman, has been appropriated and reconfigured by postcolonial writers around the world, creating a new genre known as the "postcolonial Bildungsroman. Through critical readings of various texts, the study reveals how issues concerning postcolonial writers---decolonization, sovereignty, trauma, war, and identity---become integral parts of the genre's "rewriting." An examination of the critical history about the genre reveals that the cultural and ideological roots of the genre have been modified as well as contested as the genre is appropriated by writers who exist and write outside of the genre's traditional pale. First Nations authors use the genre to explore how colonialism impaired and destroyed indigenous identity and culture; the genre then is used to reclaim and assert lost histories and identities as the means by which healing on an individual and communal level may be achieved. Postcolonial writers seeking to articulate the experiences of sex workers use the postcolonial Bildungsroman to illustrate how culturally sanctioned sexual violence devastates the developing personality. The violence and physical displacement of civil war has a similar effect on the identities of the soldiers who fight the wars; such texts also chronicle the " war Bildung" in which boys and young men learn how to be, and identify as, soldiers. The postcolonial Bildungsromane that chronicles the AIDS epidemic becomes the means through which cautionary tales are offered to the reader, and the "Bildung" characters experience is literally the difference between life and death. At its root, the postcolonial Bildungsroman is about survival---beautiful, ugly, frightening---but always true.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Sagar, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Comparative literature

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