Il romanzo postcoloniale tra realismo, corpo e tragedia. A proposito del volume di A. Quayson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel , Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 273

The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel is a useful collection of essays by the leading scholars in the field. It provides an essential compendium of the different perspectives and achievements in the domain of  postcolonial studies focusing primarily on the novel as an aesthetic form tied up with social and political issues. The main aim of this article is not to summarize each essay, but to foreground the conceptual density of the volume and highlight the most fertile ideas and approaches proposed in the text. These include the complexity of the definition of “postcolonialism”; the realistic devices used by postcolonial authors against the imperialist mystification of reality; the importance of including “spatiality” in postcolonial discourse; the reuse and manipulation of tragedy in plays or novels in the postcolonial context.