Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction

Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction PDF Author: H. S. Komalesha
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039111121
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Rapid developments in the fields of trade, market, commerce and telecommunication technologies, together with cultural confrontations at the global level are creating a paradigmatic shift in people's understanding of selfhood and identity. This book makes a serious attempt to trace and map out the making of contemporary post-national identities within the subcontinental cultural production of India and in its English Fiction. One of the structural ventures of this study is that these newer identities, which are basically fragmented, ruptured, hyphenated, and palimpsestic in nature, require new descriptions and new elaborations within the field of creative literature and literary criticism. In order to pursue its research on these lines, the present work contrasts the notion of subjecthood and identity with the earlier phases of Indian cultural imagination as represented in some of the pioneering works of Indian English Fiction that have now attained a canonical status. By analysing some of the predominant concerns that work as leitmotif in most of the Indian English novels, the book brings together and reinterprets some problematic concepts such as history, culture, religion, nation and nationalism and creates a theoretical axis upon which it charts insightful and engaging aspects of selfhood and identity.

Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction

Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction PDF Author: H. S. Komalesha
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039111121
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rapid developments in the fields of trade, market, commerce and telecommunication technologies, together with cultural confrontations at the global level are creating a paradigmatic shift in people's understanding of selfhood and identity. This book makes a serious attempt to trace and map out the making of contemporary post-national identities within the subcontinental cultural production of India and in its English Fiction. One of the structural ventures of this study is that these newer identities, which are basically fragmented, ruptured, hyphenated, and palimpsestic in nature, require new descriptions and new elaborations within the field of creative literature and literary criticism. In order to pursue its research on these lines, the present work contrasts the notion of subjecthood and identity with the earlier phases of Indian cultural imagination as represented in some of the pioneering works of Indian English Fiction that have now attained a canonical status. By analysing some of the predominant concerns that work as leitmotif in most of the Indian English novels, the book brings together and reinterprets some problematic concepts such as history, culture, religion, nation and nationalism and creates a theoretical axis upon which it charts insightful and engaging aspects of selfhood and identity.

Perspectives on Indian English Fiction

Perspectives on Indian English Fiction PDF Author: Jaydipsinh Dodiya
Publisher: Sarup & Sons
ISBN: 9788176256391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Contributed articles on 20th century English fiction.

Exploring Identity in Literature and Life Stories

Exploring Identity in Literature and Life Stories PDF Author: Guri Barstad
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527536807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Today, globalization, migration and political polarization complicate the individual’s search for a cohesive identity, making identity formation and transformation key issues in everyday life. This collection of essays highlights a number of the dimensions of identity, including cultural hybridity, religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, sexuality, and childhood, and explores how they are thematized in different narratives. The stories discussed are set in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Polynesia, Norway, Romania, Spain and South Africa, emphasizing today’s international focus on identity. The majority of the contributions here focus on literary texts, while others investigate identity formations in interviews, language corpora, student reading logs, film, theatre and pathographies.

National Identity and Cultural Representation in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai

National Identity and Cultural Representation in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai PDF Author: Sonali Das
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527509907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
This book is the first of its kind to examine the theories of nation and national identity in both the West (according to the theories of Benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie) and in the East (in the light of the works of Jawaharlal Nehru) as they apply to the novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. The second part of the twentieth century witnessed a new interface between fiction and history called “New History”. It brought into its purview the hitherto marginalized sections of society like slaves, peasants, workers, women, and children. Whereas the subalterns in The Inheritance of Loss are disempowered by the brunt of globalisation and neo-colonialism, the subalterns in The God of Small Things face the ire of the deep-seated divisions based on caste and gender bias in a postcolonial society. In addition, this book also deals with contemporary social issues like individual identity in a multicultural world where cultures and nature converge into myriad ways of living. It will be of immense benefit to MA and MPhil students all over India, as well as to PhD scholars and teachers of English literature both in India and abroad.

Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel

Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel PDF Author: Mostafa Azizpour Shoobie
Publisher: South Asian Literature, Arts, and Culture Studies
ISBN: 9781433164675
Category : Cosmopolitanism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel argues that select novels by Indian writers in English largely present a kind of micro-cosmopolitanism that preserves nation as a primary site for social and cultural formation while opening it up to critique. During colonial times, local cultural expression wrestled with the global as represented by the systems of empire. The ideal subject or literary work was one that could happily inhabit both ends of the center-periphery in a kind of cosmopolitan space determined by imperial metropolitan and local elite cultures. As colonies liberated themselves, new national formations had to negotiate a mix of local identity, residual colonial traits, and new forces of global power. New and more complex cosmopolitan identities had to be discovered, and writers and texts reflecting these became correspondingly more problematic to assess, as old centralisms gave way to new networks of cultural control. This book contends that novels written in the context of the postcolonial cultural politics after the successful attainment of national independence question how a nation is to be made while recognizing its relation to globalization. The strong waves of globalization enforce sociological, political, and economic values in developing countries that may not be readily acceptable in those societies. Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel focuses on three novelists in particular: Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Aravind Adiga, all of whom have received the prestigious Man Booker Prize for their work. Despite the varied but broadly elite cosmopolitan positions of these writers, they all depict characters working toward a cosmopolitanism from the grassroots, rather than through a top-down practice. Furthermore, these writers and their works, to varying degrees, turn a suspicious eye to the effects (cultural, economic, or otherwise) of globalization as a phenomenon that can prevent possibilities for more fluid forms of belonging and border-crossing. Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel should appeal to researchers in cultural studies interested in Indian English fiction and/or the form and function of cosmopolitanism in a rapidly globalizing postcolonial world.

The Nowhere Man

The Nowhere Man PDF Author: Kamala Markandaya
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781908446992
Category : East Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Nowhere Man is an intricate, perceptive tragedy of alienation centered around the violent racism sparked by Britain's post-war immigration drive. Srinivas, an elderly Brahmin, has been living in south London suburb for 30 years. After the death of his son, and later his wife, this lonely man is befriended by an Englishwoman in her sixties, whom he takes into his home. The two form a deep and abiding relationship. But the haven they have created for themselves proves to be a fragile one. Racist violence enters their world and Srinivas's life changes irrevocably--as does his dream of England as a country of tolerance and equality. First published in 1972, The Nowhere Man depicts a London convulsed by fear and bitterness. Truly shocking, The Nowhere Man is as relevant today as when it was first published almost 50 years ago.

The Foreigner

The Foreigner PDF Author: Arun Joshi
Publisher: Orient Paperbacks
ISBN: 8122207189
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The Foreigner is a story of a young man who is detached, almost alienated — a man who sees himself as a stranger wherever he lives or goes — in Kenya, where he is born, in England and USA where he is a student and in India where he finally settles down. His detachment transcends barriers of geography, nationality and culture. It propels him from one crisis to another, sucking in the wake several other people, including June, an attractive American with whom he has a short lived but passionate affair. The transitoriness associated with the word 'foreigner' permeates the novel and is handled with remarkable maturity reminding the reader of epoch-making The Outsider by Albert Camus. The protagonist's anguish at the meaninglessness of the human condition and the eventual release from the anxieties of life through karmayoga, the principle of action without attachment, add to the aesthetics of the work.

Imagining Indianness

Imagining Indianness PDF Author: Diana Dimitrova
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319410156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This book brings together several important essays examining the interface between identity, culture, and literature within the issue of cultural identity in South Asian literature. The book explores how one imagines national identity and how this concept is revealed in the narratives of the nation and the production of various cultural discourses. The collection of essays examines questions related to the interpretation of the Indian past and present, the meanings of ancient and venerated cultural symbols in ancient times and modern, while discussing the ideological implications of the interpretation of identity and “Indianness” and how they reflect and influence the power-structures of contemporary societies in South Asia. Thus, the book studies the various aspects of the on-going process of constructing, imagining, re-imagining, and narrating “Indianness”, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of India.

Literature Lost

Literature Lost PDF Author: John Martin Ellis
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300075793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In the span of less than a generation, university humanities departments have experienced an almost unbelievable reversal of attitudes, now attacking and undermining what had previously been considered best and most worthy in the Western tradition. John M. Ellis here scrutinizes the new regime in humanistic studies. He offers a careful, intelligent analysis that exposes the weaknesses of notions that are fashionable in humanities today. In a clear voice, with forceful logic, he speaks out against the orthodoxy that has installed race, gender, and class perspectives at the center of college humanities curricula. Ellis begins by showing that political correctness is a recurring impulse of Western society and one that has a discouraging history. He reveals the contradictions and misconceptions that surround the new orthodoxy and demonstrates how it is most deficient just where it imagines itself to be superior. Ellis contends that humanistic education today, far from being historically aware, relies on anachronistic thinking; far from being skeptical of Western values, represents a ruthless and unskeptical Western extremism; far from being valuable in bringing political perspectives to bear, presents politics that are crude and unreal; far from being sophisticated in matters of "theory," is largely ignorant of the range and history of critical theory; far from valuing diversity, is unable to respond to the great sweep of literature. In a concluding chapter, Ellis surveys the damage that has been done to higher education and examines the prospects for change.

Feminism in Contemporary British and Indian English Fiction

Feminism in Contemporary British and Indian English Fiction PDF Author: Miti Pandey
Publisher: Sarup & Sons
ISBN: 9788176253628
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description