Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel

Rita Sakr is Research Fellow in the Department of English and Intercultural Studies at the University of Sherbrooke, Canada. She has written on cultural geography, James Joyce, Orhan Pamuk, and migrant literatures. With Finn Fordham, she is co-editing Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel, and with Caroline Rooney, The Siege of Beirut and the Ethics of Representation.

• Abbreviations; List of Illustrations; 1. Reading Monumental Space at the Crossroads of Disciplines; 2. "broken pillars": Counter-Monumental Tactics in James Joyce's Ulysses; 3. Burning Temples and Falling Empires: Unraveling Arsonists' Dreams in Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; 4. A History of Violence: Martyrs' Square and the Fractured Space of Memory in Rashid al-Daif's Dear Mr Kawabata; 5. Tabooed Spaces of Greatness and Shame: Monumentalization and the Representation of Terror and Trauma in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book and Snow; Postscript Post-2011: Monumental Space and the Collapse of Arab Dictatorships; Selected Bibliography; Index.

"This highly engrossing study explores our paradoxical relation to monumental space as mediated by the post-imperial novel. It demonstrates the interplay between memorialisation and erasure, sacralisation and desecration, subservience and rebellious subversion, animism and petrification, combining fascinatingly detailed cultural and historical knowledge with illuminating and nuanced theoretical reflection. Rita Sakr not only reveals the transformative potential of monumental space but transforms our understanding of it through the original and timely ways in which she co-inflects the monumental with the post-imperial and brings a thought-provoking literary articulation to bear on the field of cultural geography." -- Caroline Rooney, Professor in the School of English, Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research, and RCUK Global Uncertainties Fellow, University of Kent, UK