Description: "Staging a vital counter-narrative to global nationalist discourses, this book explores how 20th and 21st-century postcolonial literatures criticize hetero-normative definitions of nationhood, weaving a trans-national and trans-Atlantic network of influences despite the pronounced geopolitical and cultural differences. With wide geographical scope and a comparative approach, Szczeszak-Brewer delves into the metaphorical currency of male impotence, sexual aggression and gender-nonconforming characters in nationalist narratives from Ireland, the U.S, Poland, France, Britain, South Africa and Senegal, in the work of writers such as James Joyce, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Toomer, Bessie Head, Zoèe Wicomb, JM Coetzee, Andrea Levy, Patrick McCabe, David Diop"--
Brief description: Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is Professor of English and John P. Collett Chair in Rhetoric at Wabash College, USA where she teaches 20th-century World Literatures, Gender Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published two books-Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce (2010) and Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (2015), as well as critical essays and creative nonfiction. She co-edited a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on Irish and South African literary and cultural intersections. Her 2023 memoir in essays The Hunger Book won the Gournay Prize.
Review Quotes: "This book's sophisticated literary study of the complex intersection(s) of sex and nation within global geopolitics advances inclusive narratives of belonging - it is an informative, innovative and important read." --Aretha Phiri, Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University, South Africa