Struggling with the Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Formation in an Age of Crisis

This review examines The Postcolonial Bildungsroman, a volume edited by Arnab Dutta Roy and Paul Ugor, as a timely and conceptually expansive intervention in the contemporary literary debate on the Bildungsroman, especially in its connection to postcolonial literature. Tracing the volume’s introduction, five thematic sections and afterword, the review highlights the productive tension at the core of the debate, balancing both the genre’s broad anti-colonial critique and its theoretical exhaustion as an aesthetic device.