Book Review: Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation

The essays investigate the trajectory and circulation of Saids work and its implications and ramications for literary and cultural studies, aesthetics, politics, secular criticism, universal humanism, and nationalism, to name some of the more salient themes. Timothy Brennan and Michael Wood both make powerful arguments for the centrality of the idea of the literary to the trajectory of Saids intellectual production, establishing Saids signicance not just in the founding of a eld that came to be called postcolonial studies, but also in the transformation of comparative literature and world literature. In the past decade, as postcolonial studies have evolved into the study of world literature, his arguments appear nally to have carried the Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and Womens and Gender Studies at the University of Texas in Austin.