Read more
Zusatztext Wiemann identifies an important and under-examined segment of the postcolonial canon – the verse-novel – and provides an eloquent defense and analysis of key works in that form, emphasizing the interconnectedness of formal and ideological analysis. A valuable expansion of the discourse of the “world novel” beyond the usual suspects. Informationen zum Autor Dirk Wiemann is Chair in English Literature at University of Potsdam, Germany. He is author of Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (2008) and Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (2019, with Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein and Nicole Waller), and editor of numerous collections, including Postcolonial Justice (2017, with Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein and Nicole Waller) and Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism (2014, with Gaby Mahlberg). He was founding member of the Research Training Group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” and director of the bilateral research network “Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space” with the University of Delhi, India. Klappentext Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the 'gutter' in graphic narratives - the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence - to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar 'gappiness' has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential 'world novels' (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers).The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In 'planetary' verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai'i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/making; while post-national verse novels, particularly in Britain, modify the established paradigms of imagined communities. Dirk Wiemann's study speculates whether the resurgence of verse novels correlates with the apprehension of inhabiting a world that has become unpredictable and dangerous but also promising: a 'post-prosaic' world. Vorwort A systematic analysis of contemporary verse novels and how textual gaps serve as symbolic interventions into current debates on the planetary and the post-national. Zusammenfassung Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts draws on the notion of the ‘gutter’ in graphic narratives – the gap between panels that a reader has to imaginatively fill to generate narrative sequence – to analyse the largely overlooked literary form of the verse novel. Marked at all levels by the tense constellation of segment and sequence, and a conspicuously 'gappy' texture, verse novels offer productive alternatives to the dominant prose novel in contemporary fiction, where a similar ‘gappiness’ has become a hallmark, as illustrated by the loosely interlaced multi-strand plot structures of influential ‘world novels’ (Bolaño, Mitchell, Powers).The verse novel is a form particularly prolific in the postcolonial world and among diasporic or minoritarian writers in the Global North. This study concentrates on two of the most prominent areas in which verse novels distinguish themselves from the prose novel to read texts by Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, Bernardine Evaristo, Patience Agbabi and others: In ‘planetary’ verse novels from the Caribbean, Canada, Samoa and Hawai’i, the central trope of the volcano evokes a world in constant un/makin...
