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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination, Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott
ISBN# 9780838642016
Reviewed by: Annie Vocature Bullock
Postcolonialnetworks.com |
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Martin McKinsey's book is an energetic comparative reading of three very different poets, each occupying a peculiar position with respect to the cultural and political center of the British Empire. McKinsey organizes his reading around the trope of Hellenism, which refers broadly to the "historically mediated idea of Ancient Greece and its cultures," as cultivated among intellectuals in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and narrowly to "the espousal of the Hellenic ideal and the assertion of Greek exceptionalism" among Victorian authors. McKinsey applies a postcolonial analytic to Yeats, Cavafy, and Walcott, each of whom appropriated Hellenism differently according to specific local concerns.
McKinsey is both poet and critic. His argumentation within the work is less academic than it is literary in its own right. The reader is therefore drawn into the essay-like structure of the book, experiencing the excursus on post-colonial kenosis as a welcome flash of insight. The criticism stands only because the style of presentation is all but impossible to skim effectively.
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