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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Maria Elena Capitani
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2018.01.005
University of Parma, Parma, Italy
The award-winning British writer Bernardine Evaristo develops a creative approach to the politics of form and content in her verse-novel The Emperor’s Babe, published in 2001 and set in Londinium in AD 211. This colourful reconstruction of Roman London is peopled with unforgettable characters, such as the teenage protagonist Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants who becomes the wife of an absent man of status and the emperor’s mistress. Believing that poetry should not be obscure and elitist, Evaristo opts for a highly intertextual and polyphonic novel in irregular verse which vividly rewrites the history of the black presence in Roman Britain from the perspective of the marginalized. In a unique way, in The Emperor’s Babe, past and present, Romanitas and Britishness, tradition and the subversion of the canon intriguingly overlap, creating a multilayered narrative of resistance. In particular, this article focuses on Evaristo’s radical poetics, demonstrating how this author creates a seemingly inaccessible and hybrid language which can be easily intelligible and appealing.
Bernardine Evaristo, hybridization, verse fiction, canon, language
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