Join us at this week's meeting of the Philosophy Club in Auerbach 320 on Wednesday, Nov. 5 from 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. as Simone Puleo and Arnab Roy present on the recently published work: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (University of Alberta Press, 2025. https://ualbertapress.ca/9781772127706/the-postcolonial-bildungsroman/).
Coedited by Dr. Roy and Paul Ugor, with Dr. Puleo among its essay contributors, this new work offers a fresh comparative lens, demonstrating how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature.
In recent decades authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the bildungsroman literary genre to reflect on coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. For example, another work, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place,
The publication emphasizes matters of space, place, and environment—concepts intrinsically linked to the bildungsroman’s processes of meaning-making and critique. From Latin America to South Asia to Africa, the contributors focus on three distinct but interrelated themes: ecology, cultural geography, and mediascapes. They consider aesthetic formations that address the themes of spatiality, youth, individual and collective experiences of social stagnation or growth, the unique challenges faced by certain global subjects on account of the places they inhabit, and whether or not futurity is guaranteed for them. This unique collection delves into myriad features of the postcolonial bildungsroman, enlarging our theoretical understanding of the genre as well as of media and literature in the postcolonial world.
Born in Palermo, Sicily and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, Simone Maria Puleo earned a PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Connecticut in 2020. His interests include the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cosmopolitanism, and international relations: Italy and the United States. He runs a summer study-abroad program to Salerno and the Amalfi Coast focused on UNESCO World Heritage sites in Southern Italy.
Dr. Puleo currently offers Italian courses at all levels and is the Director of the Italian Resource Center (Elihu Burritt Library, Room 304).
Arnab Dutta Roy is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. His research lies at the intersection of postcolonialism, human rights theory, and modern South Asian literature, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Review, Comparatist, Genre, New Literary History, and others.
He is the co-editor of two books on the postcolonial Bildungsroman: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (University of Alberta Press, 2025) and The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place (forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press, January 2026). In addition, he has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature titled Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature. He is currently working on a monograph titled Universalisms in South Asian Literature that draws on interdisciplinary work in postcolonial theory and human rights to analyze literary responses to colonialism from South Asia. At FGCU, he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on world literature and postcolonial theory.
Questions? Contact Brian Skelly at bskelly@hartford.edu or 413.273.2273.
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Come live or join online! Invite friends. Suggest topics and activities. Take over the club! It belongs to you!