Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste
Title | Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste PDF eBook |
Author | Toral Jatin Gajarawala |
Publisher | Fordham Univ Press |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0823245241 |
Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?
Untouchable Fictions
Title | Untouchable Fictions PDF eBook |
Author | Toral Jatin Gajarawala |
Publisher | Modern Language Initiative |
Pages | 258 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780823245253 |
William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA "Some Time between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature" May 2011 issue of PMLA Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text and its radical critique with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the 20th and 21st centuries. This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, and cultural studies, makes a crucial intervention into studies of literary realism and will be important for all readers interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics and between social movements and cultural production.
Untouchable Fictions
Title | Untouchable Fictions PDF eBook |
Author | Toral Jatin Gajarawala |
Publisher | |
Pages | 272 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Caste in literature |
ISBN | 9780823250783 |
This title considers the crisis of literary realism - progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental - in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ('untouchable caste') fiction.
Vernacular English
Title | Vernacular English PDF eBook |
Author | Akshya Saxena |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 2022-03 |
Genre | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES |
ISBN | 0691223130 |
"After India's Partition and independence in 1947, "cleansing" Hindi by removing Urdu words was part of the nation's effort to disavow Islamic influence and to forge an exclusively Hindu "Indian" identity. Sanskritized Hindi was anointed the official language of India in 1950, a move protested by non-Hindi-speaking people; in 1963, lawmakers responded to these protests by making English an associate official language. Itself a language steeped in a history of colonial violence, English nevertheless was chosen to mend the gaps created by the imposition of Hindi and to uphold the ideal of democracy. This book considers English as part of the multilingual local milieu of India (a country where more than twenty languages are spoken) not as a colonial language imposed from without. Through a close study of English in India, from the language policies under British rule to the present day, Akshya Saxena argues that low castes and minority ethnic groups-those oppressed by or denied access to English-have routinely and effectively used the language to make political demands on the state. The book examines the ways that Indians use English in literary, spoken, and visual media, from novels to films to global protest movements, to express and shape their experience within the Indian state"--
Representations of Dalit Protagonists
Title | Representations of Dalit Protagonists PDF eBook |
Author | Hanumant Ajinath Lokhande |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 282 |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN | 3031664442 |
Writing Resistance
Title | Writing Resistance PDF eBook |
Author | Laura R. Brueck |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 238 |
Release | 2014-06-10 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0231166044 |
Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. BrueckÕs approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a ÒcounterpublicÓ generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.
India's Forests, Real and Imagined
Title | India's Forests, Real and Imagined PDF eBook |
Author | Alan Johnson |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 281 |
Release | 2022-12-29 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0755634128 |
As they seek to explore evolving and conflicting ideas of nationhood and modernity, India's writers have often chosen forests as the dramatic setting for stories of national identity. India's Forests, Real and Imagined explores how these settings have been integral to India's sense of national consciousness. Alan Johnson demonstrates that modern writers have drawn on older Indian literary traditions of the forest as a place of exile, trial and danger to shape new ideas of India as a modern nation. The book casts new light on a wide range of modern writers, from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – widely regarded as the first Indian novelist – to contemporary authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie as well as local attitudes to nationhood and the environment across the country.