The Indian English Novel

The Indian English Novel

Author: Priyamvada Gopal

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0199544379

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The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. It is often claimed that unlike the British novel or the novel in indigenous Indian languages, Anglophone fiction in India has no genealogy of its own. Interrogating this received idea, Priyamvada Gopal shows how the English-language or Anglophone Indian novel is a heterogeneous body of fiction in which certain dominant trends and recurrent themes are, nevertheless, discernible. It is a genre that has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape what scholars have termed 'the idea of India'. Structured around themes such as 'Gandhi and Fiction', 'The Bombay Novel', and 'The Novel of Partition', this study traces lines of influence across significant literary works and situates individual writers and texts in their historical context. Its emergence out of the colonial encounter and nation-formation has impelled the Anglophone novel to return repeatedly to the question: 'What is India?' In the most significant works of Anglophone fiction, 'India' emerges not just as a theme but as a point of debate, reflection, and contestation. Writers whose works are considered in their context include Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth.


Magical Realism in Postcolonial British Fiction

Magical Realism in Postcolonial British Fiction

Author: Taner Can

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 3838267540

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This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), and Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion, the author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European Painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then proceeds to analyze the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries.


Postcolonial Satire

Postcolonial Satire

Author: Amy L. Friedman

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-10-16

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1498571972

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Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.


Vernacular English

Vernacular English

Author: Akshya Saxena

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0691223149

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How English has become a language of the people in India—one that enables the state but also empowers protests against it Against a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in the world today. A comparative study of three centuries of English literature and media in India, this original and provocative book tells the story of English in India as a tale not of imperial coercion, but of a people’s language in a postcolonial democracy. Focusing on experiences of hearing, touching, remembering, speaking, and seeing English, Akshya Saxena delves into a previously unexplored body of texts from English and Hindi literature, law, film, visual art, and public protests. She reveals little-known debates and practices that have shaped the meanings of English in India and the Anglophone world, including the overlooked history of the legislation of English in India. She also calls attention to how low castes and minority ethnic groups have routinely used this elite language to protest the Indian state. Challenging prevailing conceptions of English as a vernacular and global lingua franca, Vernacular English does nothing less than reimagine what a language is and the categories used to analyze it.


A History of the Indian Novel in English

A History of the Indian Novel in English

Author: Ulka Anjaria

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-08

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1107079969

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A History of the Indian Novel in English traces the development of the Indian novel from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up until the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that shed light on the legacy of English in Indian writing. Organized thematically, these essays examine how English was "made Indian" by writers who used the language to address specifically Indian concerns. Such concerns revolved around the question of what it means to be modern as well as how the novel could be used for anti-colonial activism. By the 1980s, the Indian novel in English was a global phenomenon, and India is now the third largest publisher of English-language books. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History invites readers to question conventional accounts of India's literary history.


In Another Country

In Another Country

Author: Priya Joshi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0231125844

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Asking what Indian readers chose to read and why, In Another Country shows how readers of the English novel transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. She further demonstrates how Indian novelists writing in English, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs. Taken together in this manner, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture is continually translated and transformed in a colonial and postcolonial context.


Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947

Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947

Author: Alex Tickell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1136618414

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"This book is an interdisciplinary study of representations of terrorism and political violence in the fiction and journalism of colonial India. Focusing on key historical episodes such as the Calcutta "Black Hole," the anti-thuggee campaigns of the 1830s, the 1857 rebellion, and anti-colonial terrorism in Edwardian London, it argues that exceptional violence was integral to colonial sovereignty and that the threat of violence mutually defined discursive relations between colonizer and colonized. Moving beyond previous studies of colonial discourse, and drawing on contemporary analyses of terrorism, Tickell examines texts by both colonial and Indian authors, tracing their contending engagements with terrorizing violence in selected newspapers, journals, novels and short stories. The study includes readings of several significant early Indian-English works for the first time, from dissident periodicals like Hurrish Chunder Mookerjis Hindoo Patriot (1856-66) and Shyamji Krishnavarmas Indian Sociologist (1905-9) to neglected fictions such as Kylas Dutts parable of anti-colonial rebellion "Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945" (1845) and Sarath Kumar Ghoshs The Prince of Destiny (1909). These are examined alongside works by better-known Anglo-Indian authors such as Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1838), Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters (1897), Rudyard Kiplings short fictions and novels by Edmund Candler and E.M. Forster. The study concludes with an analysis of Indian-English fiction of the 1930s, notably Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable (1935), and goes on to read Gandhis philosophy of ahimsa (non-violence) as a strategic response to a colonial and nationalist terror-politics."


Indian Genre Fiction

Indian Genre Fiction

Author: Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-07-06

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0429850905

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This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions. Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader.