Bloomsbury Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study

About the Author Rita Sakr is a Visiting Lecturer at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published on Middle-Eastern studies, migrant writings, post-conflict literatures, and James Joyce. She is co-editor of James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (2011) and is co-editing The (1982) Siege of Beirut and the Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism (forthcoming). Product Description This title establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space. There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings. However, just as monuments mark their territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries, so these discourses set a boundary between their authority as platforms on which the interpretation of monumental space occurs and, in this respect, the different authority of the novel. This study crosses this boundary by means of dynamic interdisciplinary movements between selected novels by James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Rashid al-Daif, and Orhan Pamuk, on the one hand, and various theoretical perspectives, history, and cultural geography, on the other. Through the specific choice of literary texts that represent monumental space in atypical post-imperial geopolitical contexts, "Monumental Space and the Post-Imperial Novel" brings into question many postcolonial paradigms. Sakr establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and cultural geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space. Review "This highly engrossing study explores our paradoxical relation to monumental space as mediated by the post-imperial novel. It demonstrates the interplay between memorialisation and erasure, sacralisation and desecration, subservience and rebellious subversion, animism and petrification, combining fascinatingly detailed cultural and historical knowledge with illuminating and nuanced theoretical reflection. Rita Sakr not only reveals the transformative potential of monumental space but transforms our understanding of it through the original and timely ways in which she co-inflects the monumental with the post-imperial and brings a thought-provoking literary articulation to bear on the field of cultural geography." Caroline Rooney, Professor in the School of English, Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research, and RCUK Global Uncertainties Fellow, University of Kent, UK