History of the Indian Novel in English 9781107079960, 2015004873

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History of the Indian Novel in English
 9781107079960, 2015004873

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
A History of the Indian Novel in English
Bhasha Modernities and the Question of English
Reading the Postcolonial
Contemporaneity and History
Terminology and Structure of the Book
Notes
1 Beginnings: Rajmohan’s Wife and the Novel in India
The Colonial Public Sphere and the Politics of Print
Translation and Cultural Transactions
The Novel and Colonial Society
Persons, Objects, and Habitus
Space, Plot, and the Colonial Uncanny
The Lives of Women and the Future of the Novel
Notes
2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
Reference: A Theoretical Detour
Novelistic Discourse and Epistemic Access
Conclusion
Notes
3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
Toru Dutt: Romance and Cosmopolitanism
Krupabai Satthianadhan and Ramabai: Conversion and Reform
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: Feminist Utopias
Swarnakumari Devi Ghosal: An Unfinished Song
Notes
4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
Is the Anglophone Indian Novel also a Progressive Novel?
The Retrospective Politics of Exclusion
The Origins of Progressive Writing: Local, National, Colonial, International
Anglophone Novelists and the Contested Terrain of the Progressive Novel
The Varied Careers of Anglophone Progressive Novelists
Notes
5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
Modernity and Antiquity in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
Narayan’s Invention of Tradition
Anand’s Revolutionary Socialism
Notes
6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
Locating Indian Modernism
Phases of Modernism
Theorizing Modernist Realism
Anand’s Modernist Realism
Premchand’s Theory of Realism
7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
Harbingers of a Melancholic Modernity
The Big Fat Indian (Partition) Novel
Geo-Desire and the (Continued) Search for the Sacred
Conclusion
Notes
8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
Debating Purdah and Polygamy
Women Outside the Home
Independence and Partition
Notes
9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
Translation in the Indian Context
Colonial Modernity in Tagore’s Gora
Brahminism as the Anti-Modern in Anantha Murthy’s Samskara
The Rise of a Modern Dalit Consciousness in Valmiki’s Joothan
Conclusion
Notes
10 Emergency Fictions
Emergency Fiction
Prefiguring Emergency
Truth Vindicated
Configuring Emergency
Coda
Notes
11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
Remembering Max Ophüls
“O, My Shoes Are Japanese”
A Turn to High Culture
Mother Tongue as Palimpsest
Notes
12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
Compositional Structure
Looking Too Closely
Tipping the Balance
Accommodating the Past
Conclusion
Notes
13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
“Politics Without Issues”: Shashi Deshpande and Sunetra Gupta
Rooted Dislocations
Deep-Rooted Shadows
Home Truths
Notes
14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
Intimacy and Disability in Transition
Rethinking Sexuality and Revolution
Conclusion: Indigenous Ecologies, Queer Intimacy, and the Postcolonial City
Notes
15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
Claiming History
Recovering Buried History
History under Threat
Notes
16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
Virtue’s Double-Bind
Virtuoso Performatives
Virtual Reality
Notes
17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
Postcolonial Dystopias and the Refusal of Future
Atrocities of the Now: Two Fictional Examples
Delirious Forms
Coda: Unreasoned Damage
Notes
18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
“Lashings of the Ultraviolent”
Colonial Planning, Post-Colonial City
Infrastructural Fiction
Notes
19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
Small Global Things
Humans as Animals
Perverse Human Rights
Notes
20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
The Culture of Books
“New” Fictions: Chetan Bhagat
A New Purpose and Presence?
Notes
21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
The Rise of the Literary Popular: Chick Lit
Desai and Deshpande: Deciding on Silence
Kala and Hasan: Deciding on Choice
Conclusion
Notes
22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
“Sultana’s Dream” and the Origins of Political Fantasy
Mythical Predecessors
The Success of Fantasy Fiction
Conclusion
Notes
23 The Indian Graphic Novel
Comics in India before the Graphic Novel
The Indian Graphic Novel Appears
Recent and Future Developments of the Indian Graphic Novel
Notes
24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
Worlds Apart
World-Building
Notes
25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
Modernity and Contemporaneity
The Politics of Humiliation
The Politics of Ressentiment
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

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