Author: Neelam Srivastava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113414220X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
This study explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s and 90s. Examining writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, and Rohinton Mistry, with particularly close readings of Midnight‘s Children, A Suitable Boy, The Shadow Lines and The Satanic Verses, Neelam Srivastava investigates different aspects of postcolonial identity within the secular framework of the Anglophone novel. The book traces the breakdown of the Nehruvian secular consensus between 1975 and 2005 through these narratives of postcolonial India. In particular, it examines how these writers use the novel form to re-write colonial and nationalist versions of Indian history, and how they radically reinvent English as a secular language for narrating India. Ultimately, it delineates a common conceptual framework for secularism and cosmopolitanism, by arguing that Indian secularism can be seen as a located, indigenous form of a cosmopolitan identity.
Author: Sourit Bhattacharya
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030373975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book argues that modernity in postcolonial India has been synonymous with catastrophe and crisis. Focusing on the literary works of the 1943 Bengal Famine, the 1967–72 Naxalbari Movement, and the 1975–77 Indian Emergency, it shows that there is a long-term, colonially-engineered agrarian crisis enabling these catastrophic events. Novelists such as Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Nabarun Bhattacharya, and Nayantara Sahgal, among others, have captured the relationship between the long-term crisis and the catastrophic aspects of the events through different aesthetic modalities within realism, ranging from analytical-affective, critical realist, quest modes to apparently non-realist ones such as metafictional, urban fantastic, magical realist, and others. These realist modalities are together read here as postcolonial catastrophic realism.
Author: Roger McNamara
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498548946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature examines how writers from religious and ethnic minority communities (Anglo-Indians, Burghers, Dalits, Muslims, and Parsis) in India and Sri Lanka engage secularism through novels, short stories, and autobiographies. Given the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, it would seem obvious that minorities would rally around secularism (the separation of church and state). However, this bookargues that the relationship between minorities and secularism is extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, it shows how writers belonging to oppressed communities can deploy secularism as a mode of critique (secular criticism) to challenge the ideologies of dominant groups—the nation, upper-castes, and religious hierarchies. On the other hand, it examines how these writers reveal that other aspects of secularism (secularization and secular time) are responsible for creating essentialized identities that have not only exacerbated relationships between majorities and minorities and between minority groups, but have also created tension within minority groups themselves. Turing to aesthetics and religious faith, these writers attempt to undermine secular social and cultural structures that are responsible for this crisis of minority identity.
Author: Ulka Anjaria
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107079969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
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.
Author: Amardeep Singh
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443802697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction shows the path to secularization in the modern novel in comparative perspective. Writers as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Taslima Nasrin, and James Wood, have all struggled with religious orthodoxy in their personal lives, and are some of the most important and representative "secular" writers in the modern world canon. But their novels, which are far more than mere anti-religious manifestos, directly reflect the continued power of religious communities and institutions in the modern world. While religion is in a very real sense displaced from epistemological centrality in modernity, all of these writers suggest that religious texts, rituals, and communities have a force that is, in George Eliot's words, “still throbbing” in modern life. In a series of close readings, Literary Secularism argues that the intimate, often deeply ambivalent representation of religion is a key feature of modern writing and is central to the larger intellectual and historical project of modernity. "Literary Secularism" is then a complex literary ethos, which impinges as much on style, language, and novelistic form as on theme. The close readings here of novels such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Rabindranath Tagore's Gora, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses all hinge on the ambiguity of religious and secular discourses. In some cases, the ambiguity is expressed through the affective and embodied experience of the protagonists, whose private subjectivity often conflicts with their public identities. The conflict between present and private is also explored in a dedicated chapter on secularism and feminism in India, as well as with regard to the global crisis of secularism that has emerged following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. While the particular experiences of the various narratives vary somewhat from author to author, all of the authors in this study are interested in defining a way of being secular that no sociological or ideological formula can fully describe. Correspondingly, while works of literature are certainly artifacts marking key moments in the history of secularisation, literature by itself doesn't produce secularism in either the cultural or the political context. In arguing for the "literary" as a historically-specific social and cultural mode of secularity, Literary Secularism offers a unique perspective on the problem of secularisation that may be of interest to fields such as literary criticism, religious studies, the sociology of religion, and polticial theory.
Author: Sunita Sinha
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN: 9788126909858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Author: Florian Stadtler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135964300
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
This book analyses the novels of Salman Rushdie and their stylistic conventions in the context of Indian popular cinema and its role in the elaboration of the author’s arguments about post-independence postcolonial India. Focusing on different genres of Indian popular cinema, such as the ‘Social’, ‘Mythological’ and ‘Historical’, Stadtler examines how Rushdie’s writing foregrounds the epic, the mythic, the tragic and the comic, linking them in storylines narrated in cinematic parameters. The book shows that Indian popular cinema’s syncretism becomes an aesthetic marker in Rushdie’s fiction that allows him to elaborate on the multiplicity of Indian identity, both on the subcontinent and abroad, and illustrates how Rushdie uses Indian popular cinema in his narratives to express an aesthetics of hybridity and a particular conceptualization of culture with which ‘India’ has become identified in a global context. Also highlighted are Rushdie’s uses of cinema to inflect his reading of India as a pluralist nation and of the hybrid space occupied by the Indian diaspora across the world. The book connects Rushdie’s storylines with modes of cinematic representation to explore questions about the role, place and space of the individual in relation to a fast-changing social, economic and political space in India and the wider world.
Author: Emma Mason
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472509242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Rethinking religion and literature in a series of chapters by leading international scholars, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths opens up a dialogue between Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Post-Secular literary cultures. Literary studies has absorbed religion as another interdisciplinary mode of inquiry without always attending to its multifacted potential to question ideologically neutral readings of culture, belief, emotion, politics and inequality. In response, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths contributes to a reevaluation of the nexus between religion and literature that is socially, affectively and materially determined in its sensitivity to the expression of belief. Each section – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Post-Secularism – is introduced by a specialist in these respective areas to introduce the critical readings of the texts and discourses that follow.
Author: Brian Black
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780936079
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Can secularism continue to provide a foundation for political legitimacy? It is often claimed that one of the cultural achievements of the West has been its establishment of secular democracy, wherein religious belief is respected but confined to the sphere of private belief. In more recent times, however, political secularism has been increasingly called into question. Religious believers, in numerous traditions, have protested against the distortion and confinement that secularism imposes on their faith. Others have become uneasily aware of the way in which secularism no longer commands universal assent in the way it once did. Confronting Secularism in Europe and India adds to this debate by staging a creative encounter between European and Indian conceptions of secularism with a view to continuing new and distinctive trajectories of thought about the place and role of secularism in contemporary times. Looking at political secularism, the relationship between secularism and religion, and religious and secular violence, this book considers whether there are viable alternatives to secularism in Europe and in India.
Author: Justin Neuman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810129892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight. In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective.
