'On the far side of revenge': Reconciliation through classical appropriation in postcolonial literature (James Joyce, Ireland, Derek Walcott, St. Lucia, Wole Soyinka, Nigeria, Seamus Heaney, Northern Ireland)

This dissertation is about the appropriation of classical Greek plots, personae, and even entire texts in Anglophone postcolonial works propounding themes of reconciliation. Key primary texts analyzed in the dissertation include James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Derek Walcott's epic-length poem, Omeros (1990) and his play The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992), as well as Wole Soyinka's play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973) and Seamus Heaney's play The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (1990). Each of these writers was educated in a British literary tradition which included classical Greek texts, yet all four have made the intriguing and highly significant choice to appropriate (rather than to abrogate) the classics, effectively by-passing Europe to access the Greeks directly. Specifically, in their appropriative works these authors have (1) turned to the classics as a source of dynamic character tropes and narrative sequences (either to be translated directly or to be strategically re-vised), and (2) made the juxtaposition of classical and contemporary elements a metaphor for the troubled but potentially propitious hybridity of the general postcolonial subject position.; Chapter 1 of the dissertation centers on colonial literary education as a hegemonic force which paradoxically alienated and enabled Joyce, Walcott, Soyinka and Heaney. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which these authors discovered, imagined and represented powerful alliances with classical Greek texts and lived experiences. Chapter 3 analyzes ways in which postcolonial translations of the classics simultaneously use the classics as metaphoric foils and illuminate the transformative power of cultural syncretism. Finally, Chapter 4 delves into the complex but vitally important issue of how the sorts of miraculous healings envisioned in texts such as Walcott's and Soyinka's are or may become possible. Friendships which develop out of shared local experiences are shown to be a primary force in the realization of reconciliation, which must always be realized individually before it may become a general social reality.