Birgit Neumann Birgit Neumann i(6521752 works by)
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Monumentalism and Monuments in Postcolonial Literatures : Dismembering Tradition Birgit Neumann , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Anglia : Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie , vol. 131 no. 2-3 2013; (p. 262-281)

'This article explores how postcolonial literatures engage in critical negotiations of monumentalism and, more specifically, contest the generic conventions of the epic, which is often considered the monumental genre par excellence. Postcolonial uses of the epic examine and challenge the ideological premises of monumental forms of remembrance, while they also exploit the epic’s symbolic value for their own political and poetic agenda. The interpretations of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune (1998) reveal that monumentalism in postcolonial literatures is punctuated by selfreflexive, ironic and non-essentialist forms, which bear witness to both the persistence and the mutability of cultural traditions. The self-reflexive monumentalism of these postcolonial writings is not only a key aesthetic strategy employed to foreground cultural difference and localize meaning but also establishes transcultural connections between seemingly diverse cultures. It is by means of the complexity of the form that the texts evoke the multivocal network of entangled histories.' (Author's abstract)
X