What issues are raised by how a novel represents? What is significant about the novel following the model of the mimetic, linear narrative of realism, presenting a “straight” take on identity and history? What is at stake in the postcolonial novel taking a more postmodern (typically metropolitan or cosmopolitan) route, which emphasizes the postcolonial condition as fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid? (See Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity, and Magical Realism) Language Which novels and which novelists speak best for the postcolonial nation? The postcolonial condition? Do we study those novels that reflect a metropolitan experience or those more expressive of a national experience? Genre (See also Metafiction) Questions and Issues Authorship and Origin This concern with representation as such is to be found in many branches of literary studies in postcolonial studies we might narrow our questions down to three general areas: authorship and origin, genre, and language. Edward Said has written on the novels of empire, examining the way they represent the relationship between empire and colony.Įssential to this exploration of the novel as a representational form is an interrogation of the whole question of representation. Postcolonial scholars do not limit this interest in representation and identity solely to the novels of postcolonial nations. A critic might look at the way a novel both contributes to and arises out of a narrative of nationhood or how it does or doesn’t operate in the context of decolonization and resistance efforts. The genre of the novel creates a world which inevitably represents and reflects the world out of which it comes. Poetry, of course, can also serve this purpose, but it is often perceived as culturally and locally specific, whereas the novel is typically understood as more accessible, communal, and public. The representational power of the novel and its ability to give voice to a people in the assertion of their identity and their history is of primary importance to postcolonial writers and scholars. To some degree, this focus on the novel reflects a general shift of attention within literary studies away from poetry towards narrative, but we can further attribute the novel’s predominance in postcolonial studies to three factors: the representational nature of the novel, its heteroglossic structure, and the function of the chronotope in the novel. While postcolonial writers have by no means failed to produce poetry nor have critics in the field entirely neglected verse, it is the novel and studies of the novel that have had the greatest influence in the field. The novel has been the aesthetic object of choice for a majority of postcolonial scholars.