In earlier work Patrick Colm Hogan argued that a few story genres-heroic, romantic, sacrificial, and others-recur prominently across separate literary traditions. These structures recur because they derive from important emotion-motivation systems governing human social interaction, such as group pride and shame.

In Colonialism and Literature Hogan extends this work to argue that these genres play a prominent role in the fashioning of postcolonization literature-literature encompassing both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Crucially, colonizers and colonized people commonly understand and explain their situation in terms of these narrative structures. In other words, the stories we tell to some degree simply reflect the facts. But we also tend to interpret our condition in terms of genre, with the genre guiding us about what to record and how to evaluate it. Hogan explores these consequential processes in theoretical and literary analysis, presenting extended, culturally and historically specified interpretations of works by Padraic Pearse (Ireland), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Yasujiro Ozu (Japan), J. M. Coetzee (South Africa), Margaret Atwood (Canada), Rabindranath Tagore (India), Abderrahmane Sissako (Mali), and Dinabandhu Mitra (India).