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a byssinia's s aMuel Johnson : ethioPian thought in the M aKing of an e nglish author . By Wendy Laura Belcher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 285 p. This ambitious and important book offers innovative approaches not just for Samuel Johnson scholars, but for literary historians and theorists of all kinds, and in particular those in postcolonial studies. It aims at nothing less than a radical revision of the received ideas about Johnson's literary psyche and, in its larger aspirations, suggests a new way to investigate the discursive connections between dominant imperial cultures and their COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 366 colonized others. Coining the term "discursive possession" to describe her new paradigm, Belcher proposes, at the outset of her study, "to shift postcolonial literary studies . . . to add a perspective on the power of other peoples' discourse to infuse European texts and to render European authors the objects of their subjects" (1). In an inversion of Homi Bhabha's notion of "mimicry," Belcher posits a kind of unconscious assimilation by European authors of the powerful self-representations of colonized cultures, by which process "an author is . . . compelled to engage in acts of mimesis related to
Comparative Literature – Duke University Press
Published: Jul 1, 2014
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