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

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. 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.