It was these last two that really piqued my interest in a postcolonial and eventually queer approach to literature: Jack Maggs is the re-telling of Dickens’s Great Expectations but from the perspective of the criminal, and Wide Sargasso Sea is a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre that gives voice to the infamous “mad woman in the attic,” Bertha. Some of the selections included Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Julian Barnes’s England, England, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The course was essentially a study of novels by and about peoples and countries that had once been ruled by the British Empire. When I was in college, I had the privilege of taking a course titled “Writing Back to Empire.” It was a study of postcolonial literature taught by the brilliant Professor Kathleen Renk, but the course title alone did more to describe that school of theory & criticism for our young minds than any other definition I’d heard.
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