Postcolonial English literature: traditions and development
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to an online lecture on the traditions and development of postcolonial English literature, which emerged from the interaction of European literature and the literature of those countries that were conquered and developed in spite of adversity. The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, Candidate of Philology.
The 20th century is recorded in the history of world civilisation as a century of huge changes in all spheres of human society. The collapse of empires and superpowers entailed a landslide process that changed not only the world map in the geographical sense, but also all the usual paradigms of geopolitical, socio-cultural and psychological nature. The collapse of the colonial system also led to the phenomenon of postcolonial culture, entailing a whole list of related subjects.
Postcolonial English literature largely broke the rules of the English language and traditional narrative. This was true of both modern prose and the historical novel. It was creating its own, original literature, whose tendency was to develop a new kind of narrative − musical and heterogeneous − incorporating different motifs and storylines. Prose of this kind can be characterised as neo-romanticism or neo-realism, characteristic of the work of such an English novelist as Zadie Smith.
A textbook example of postcolonial literature is the novel Wide Sargasso Sea by the English writer Jean Rhys. The novel was written as a kind of protest against the tradition according to which the white man occupied the dominant position in the world. The novel won the WH Smith Literary Award and brought incredible popularity to its author.
Nina Shcherbak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.