Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature

This book compares the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing—two writers whose texts frequently foreground multi-scalar transregional cartographies, points of connection and translation, and imaginative kinships between different linguistic and cultural communities. Starting from the numerous and surprising points of connection and resemblance between both authors’ texts, this book puts pressure on critical practices that would keep writers like Laing and Browning separate, positing instead the importance of paying attention to the transnational, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal imaginative relationships texts themselves generate. By comparing two writers whose texts represent different points of view on a number of shared and congruent contexts, this book seeks an original way of understanding the relationship between texts and (post-) colonial contexts, texts and other texts. Browning’s and Laing’s shared tendency to foreground trans- and post-national cartographies of relation and difference, and their similarly translational aesthetics, both demand a probing of the disciplinary separation between ‘English Literature’ and ‘Comparative Literature’, as well as ‘literature’ and ‘comparison’, and a fresh awareness of the ways in which literature itself makes comparisons and affiliations. It also involves a version of ‘world literature’ intent on accentuating the relational worlds (linguistic, imaginative, ethical) that texts themselves generate; a criticism sensitive to the ways in which writers from different times and places can still be seen to overlap. Joseph Hankinson is Career Development Lecturer in English at Jesus College, University of Oxford, UK. He currently leads the ‘Comparative African Literatures’ Research Strand at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre. He has published widely in leading international journals on literature from the nineteenth century to the present day.