Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English

Author: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

Publisher: Hotei Publishing

Published: 2015-02-04

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 9004292608

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This book starts with a consideration of a 1997 issue of the New Yorker that celebrated fifty years of Indian independence, and goes on to explore the development of a pattern of performance and performativity in contemporary Indian fiction in English (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Chandra). Such fiction, which constructs identity through performative acts, is built around a nomadic understanding of the self and implies an evolution of narrative language towards performativity whereby the text itself becomes nomadic. A comparison with theatrical performance (Peter Brook’s Mahabharata and Girish Karnad’s ‘theatre of roots’) serves to support the argument that in both theatre and fiction the concepts of performance and performativity transform classical Indian mythic poetics. In the mythic symbiosis of performance and storytelling in Indian tradition within a cyclical pattern of estrangement from and return to the motherland and/or its traditions, myth becomes a liberating space of consciousness, where rigid categories and boundaries are transcended.


Indian English Poetry and Fiction

Indian English Poetry and Fiction

Author: N. Raj Gopal

Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9788171569052

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The Essays In The Volume Are By Very Established As Well As Up-Coming Scholars And The Readers Will Realise The Substantial Values Of The Insights That The Pieces Contain. Most Anthologies Published Carry A Great Load Of Articles On Fiction Writers Who Often Are Already Familiar And Researched. This Anthology Strikes A Balance Between Poetry And Fiction. It Focuses Upon Relatively Unknown Poets Whose Poetry Merits Serious Consideration For Reason Either Of Stylistic Parameters Or Of Thematological Nemesis. Essays On Poetry Carry Comparative, Historical And Formalistic Approaches In Relation To Distinguished Poets Like Rabindranath Tagore, Nissim Ezekiel And Vikram Seth. The Editor S Interview With Charu Sheel Singh Is Added To Bring Variety And Focus Of Perspective To What A Creative Writer Feels About Literature In Question.


Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Author: Sarah Knor

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1000824705

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Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.


The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

Author: Nick Bentley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1474262740

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How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Through consideration of, among other things, the treatment of neuroscience, violence, the historical and youth subcultures in recent fiction, the essays in this collection explore the complex and still powerful relation between the novel and the world in which it is written, published and read. This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of newer voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy, David Peace and Zadie Smith as well as those more established, such as Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding the decade.


Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare

Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare

Author: Alexa Alice Joubin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-10-03

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1350410837

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A concise guide to global performances of Shakespeare, this volume combines methodologies of dramaturgy, film and performance studies, critical race and gender studies and anthropological thick description. This companion guides students from critical methodologies through big pictures of global Shakespeare to case studies that employ these methodologies. It uses a site-specific lens to examine global performances of Shakespeare on stage, on radio and on screen. As well as featuring methodological chapters on modernist adaptations, global cinema, multilingual productions and Shakespeare in translation, the volume includes short histories of adaptations of Shakespeare in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Arab world, India, the Slavic world, Iran, Afghanistan and the Farsi-speaking diaspora. It uses these micro-historical narratives to demonstrate the value of local knowledge by analysing the relationships between Shakespeare and his modern interlocutors. Finally, thematically organized case studies apply the methodologies to analyse key productions in Brazil, Korea, Yemen, Kuwait, China and elsewhere. The final chapter considers pedagogical strategies in a global setting. These chapters showcase the how of global Shakespeare studies: how do minoritized artists and audiences engage with Shakespeare? And how do we analyse the diverse and polyphonic performances with an eye towards equity and social justice?


The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Literature in English

The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Literature in English

Author: Jenny Stringer

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 774

ISBN-13: 0192122711

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Survey of twentieth century English-language writers and writing from around the world, celebrating all major genres, with entries on literary movements, periodicals, more than 400 individual works, and articles on approximately 2,400 authors.


Science Fiction in India

Science Fiction in India

Author:

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-05-30

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9354353436

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Nominated, 2023 Teaching Literature Book Award Indian Science Fiction has evolved over the years and can be seen making a mark for itself on the global scene. Dalit speculative fiction writer and editor Mimi Mondal is the first SF writer from India to have been nominated for the prestigious Hugo award. In fact, Indian SF addresses themes such as global climate change. Debates around G.C.C are not just limited to science fiction but also permeate in critical discussions on SF. This volume seeks to examine the different ways by which Indian SF narratives construct possible national futures. For this looking forward necessarily germinates from the current positional concerns of the nation. While some work has been done on Indian SF, there is still a perceptible lack of an academic rigor invested into the genre; primarily, perhaps, because of not only its relative unpopularity in India, but also its employment of futuristic sights. Towards the same, among other things, it proposes to study the growth and evolution of science fiction in India as a literary genre which accommodates the duality of the national consciousness as it simultaneously gazes ahead towards the future and glances back at the past. In other words, the book will explore how the tensions generated by the seemingly conflicting forces of tradition and modernity within the Indian historical landscape are realized through characteristic tropes of SF storytelling. It also intends to look at the interplay between the spatio-temporal coordinates of the nation and the SF narratives produced within to see, firstly, how one bears upon the other and, secondly, how processes of governance find relational structures with such narratives. Through these, the volume wishes to interrogate how postcolonial futures promise to articulate a more representative and nuanced picture of a contemporary reality that is rooted in a distinct cultural and colonial past.


Contemporary American Indian Writing

Contemporary American Indian Writing

Author: Dee Alyson Horne

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780820442983

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Starting with the premise that American Indians have been colonized, Horne outlines the dangers of colonial mimicry. She proposes a theory of subversive mimicry through which writers can use the language of the colonial power to subvert it and inscribe diverse First Nations voices. Drawing on select works by Thomas King, Beatrice Culleton, Ruby Slipperjack, Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, and Tomson Highway, the study also elucidates decolonizing strategies with which readers can collaborate.


Doppelgänger Dilemmas

Doppelgänger Dilemmas

Author: Marjorie Rubright

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-11-05

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0812290062

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The Dutch were culturally ubiquitous in England during the early modern period and constituted London's largest alien population in the second half of the sixteenth century. While many sought temporary refuge from Spanish oppression in the Low Countries, others became part of a Dutch diaspora, developing their commercial, spiritual, and domestic lives in England. The category "Dutch" catalyzed questions about English self-definition that were engendered less by large-scale cultural distinctions than by uncanny similarities. Doppelgänger Dilemmas uncovers the ways England's real and imagined proximities with the Dutch played a crucial role in the making of English ethnicity. Marjorie Rubright explores the tensions of Anglo-Dutch relations that emerged in the form of puns, double entendres, cognates, homophones, copies, palimpsests, doppelgängers, and other doublings of character and kind. Through readings of London's stage plays and civic pageantry, English and Continental polyglot and bilingual dictionaries and grammars, and travel accounts of Anglo-Dutch rivalries and friendships in the Spice Islands, Rubright reveals how representations of Dutchness played a vital role in shaping Englishness in virtually every aspect of early modern social life. Her innovative book sheds new light on the literary and historical forces of similitude in an era that was so often preoccupied with ethnic and cultural difference.