By Alicia Ortiz Alba
This week’s Colloquium statement is brought to you by Quinlan J. Finnegan with his piece called Can Irish Literature Be Considered Post-Colonial? A Study of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. We hope you enjoy it!
This essay reads the works of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce through a post-colonial lens, in order to argue that their works should be associated not with British literature, but rather with the works of the post-colonial movement. For this essay Yeats and Joyce’s works were read through the lens of post-colonial authors Derek Walcott, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and Chinua Achebe. This analysis is important because it implies that the works of Joyce and Yeats should not be categorized in the British literary canon, but rather should be associated with works of the post-colonial movement.