1,721,004 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textThe Indian author Anita Desai clearly had contemporary literary history in mind when, in the closing days of the year 2000, she reviewed the first novel by a then barely-known Pakistani writer, Mohsin Hamid. The novel was Moth Smoke (2000), completed by Hamid during occasional breaks from his job at a New York management consultancy firm, and for Desai it was a debut that signalled a new era in the fictional representation of the subcontinent. In her review, she used the Urdu term zamana, meaning ‘the times, the age’, to express the sense of an era as a shared temporality specific to the Urdu and Hindi-speaking cultures of north India and Pakistan: ‘trying to explain “our zamana”’, she stated, ‘is to hear a world of comment on our day, our history, the passage of years and of human experience’. Desai went on to contrast the slower, more contained human environments documented by an earlier generation of South-Asian authors with the edgy, urbane, drug-dealing netherworld of the Lahore elite represented in Moth Smoke:Ironically, a ‘terrible explosion’, which would have lasting consequences for Pakistan, happened elsewhere, outside South Asia, 9 months later, and subsequently provided the backdrop of Hamid’s more successful second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). However, Desai’s review of Hamid’s debut work is still prescient. Although she could have named any of a number of fictions from the late 1990s to the turn of the millennium as representative of a shift, her point was that a new kind of social experience, born out of South Asia’s accelerated economic and demographic growth, its global reach and its complex internal and regional politics, now demanded fictional representation, and in Hamid’s novel, this new world resolved, sharply and shockingly, into focus
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Life-Writing, Testimony and Biographical Fiction
Full text linkThis chapter (chapter 29 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English Vol 10, The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945) examines life-writing, memoir, and testimony as literary forms that parallel, and sometimes merge with, the anglophone novel of South East Asia and China (and identifies Jung Chang’s Wild Swans as a key work of this tradition). The majority of these writings focus on a single period in China’s modern history: the cataclysmic social upheaval of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), but this chapter also covers memoirs of those who experienced the Second World War in South East Asia and also reviews survivor testimony in English by writers from Myanmar and Cambodia
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Introduction
No full textSouth and South East Asia has produced some of the most dynamic, experimental, and commercially successful English-language novels of the post-war period. This wide-ranging volume, which comprises specially commissioned chapters from critics working in the fields of postcolonial and global literature, covers key authors, national traditions, and major themes and genres, providing an unrivalled survey of the South and South East Asian anglophone novel.
'The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Volume 10. The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945, employs a unique three-part structure covering South Asia, South East Asia, and ‘cross-border’ fictions and is the first work of its kind to provide a single comparative assessment of the novel across South and South East Asia, and in migrant lines of travel in and beyond these regions. Both an introduction and a scholarly resource, it covers internationally recognized novelists but also showcases forgotten, under-represented writers and their works. The volume provides comprehensive survey chapters on individual national traditions, comprising the anglophone novel of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Mainland China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Myanmar. Its historical and geographical reach takes in late colonial fictions, war-novels of Korea and Vietnam, and autobiographical fictions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; its formal scope spans multi-volume historical epics, political fictions, and graphic novels. The development of the South and South East Asian novel in English is further contextualized in chapters on publishing and book history, and new forms of genre fiction, making this volume an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and general readers
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'An Idea Whose Time Has Come': Indian Fiction in English After 1991
No full textThis chapter surveys recent Indian English fiction published after India's economic liberalization in 1991. It looks at changing social and publishing contexts of the contemporary novel and discusses works by Manju Kapur, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga and Chetan Bhagat
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The Discovery of Aryavarta: Hindu nationalism and Early Indian Fiction in English
No full textIn his magisterial, historically layered vision of Indian identity, The Discovery of India(1946), the third in a "complex triptych" of works which "synthesize personal life-writing, political memoir and public history," Jawaharlal Nehru describes Hindu nationalism as an undeniable but redundant part of the nation's ideological maturing. It was, he state, "a natural growth from the soil of India, but inevitably it comes in the way fo the larger nationalism which rises above differences of religion or creed." As Gyandendra Pandey argues, for nationalists such as Nehru, caught up in the momentous anticolonial struggle of the 1920s and 1930s, "communalism appeared as a great political threat, the most obvious source of danger for the advancing cause of nationalism." The answer, for India's future Prime Minister, was to advocate a progressive "refurbished" nationalism that focused on shared histories and ethnic syncretism, a counter-version of political identity that would become India's grand narrative in the immediate post-Independence period
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History, Memory, and Cultural Identity in the Novel of South East Asia
Full text linkThis co-authored chapter (Chapter 27 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume 10 The Novel in South and South East Asia) examines history and themes of collective and individual memory in post-1945 English novels of Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. In critical accounts of English fiction the historical novel is generally considered a principal genre of national and cultural identity and this chapter reflects on Anglophone historical fiction from this region
Introduction
No full textIn the colonial paradigm, the city features as a place of wary governance, concealed violence and suppressed terror. Indeed, if cities in the Global North have often been regarded historically as structured and ordered signs of civility and modernity, the cradles of liberal democracy and a civic culture, the cities of the subcontinent have more often been relegated to the other end of a developmental scale and dismissed as metropolises of “mismanagement”, “excess” and “overpopulation. Recent genealogy is traced for the new writings on the megacity in the issue: one that shadows and responds to discussions of the city of the Global South in geography, sociology and the connected emergent discipline of “urbanism”. Cultural production is a vital part of imagining the city and has the potential to influence the understanding of urban reality and reveal cities’ complex structures, hierarchies of power, racialized and classed cartographies and exclusive zoning
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Selections from 'Bengaliana' by Shoshee Chunder Dutt
No full textThis critical edition brings together early short fictions and articles in English by the Calcutta author and journalist Shoshee Chunder Dutt. It includes two of the earliest-known Indian-English fictions, Shoshee Dutt's 'The Republic of Orissa'(1845) and his cousin Kylas Chunder Dutt's rediscovered companion-piece: 'A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945'(1835). The edition includes a critical introduction, notes and a glossary
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A335 Literature in Transition: from 1800 to the Present. Book 2 'Movements' (1870-1940)
No full textBook 2 in the Open University Level 3 English Module Literature in Transition: from 1800 to the Present (A335), covering literary modernism between 1870-1940
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Publishing the South and South East Asian Novel in the Global Market
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