Muses India: Essays on English language writers from Mahomet to Rushdie
- London McFarland & Company 2013
- vii,220p. PB 22x15cm.
With Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, V.S. Naipaul and Kiran Desai winning prestigious awards for their literary output, Indian English literature has gained a voice of its own. Yet, as most readers of criticism of it agree, there is a dearth of serious examination of its authors and their work. This collection of essays attempts a contrapuntal reading of Indian English literature with what Ranjan Ghosh calls the “infusionist” approach. Since a majority of readers are made to stay away from a branded author or work, this book rejects any categorization such as “postcolonial” or “Commonwealth.” It deals with a wide range of issues—which human beings suffer from all over the world—including those that may not have anything to do with the politicized side of “the postcolonial” or “the Commonwealth.”
Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1
Corporate Bodies/Colonial Exchange: Amatory Authority and Familial Extension in The Travels of Dean Mahomet (Ken Monteith) 11 Claiming Her Own Contexts: Strategic Singularity in the Poetry of Toru Dutt (Natalie Phillips Hoffmann) 25 The Body as Prism: Trauma Captured and Reflected in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (Katherine Cottle) 38 “New Old Indias?” Bharati Mukherjee’s Fictional Canon and the Journey Towards The Tree Bride (Helena Grice) 50 From History to Intertextuality: Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World (David Callahan) 61 Roland Barthes and the Judgment of History: A Reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (Senayon S. Olaoluwa) 75 Political Satire in a Detective Mode: Genre Theory and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (Kaustav Bakshi) 89 Suicide and Rebirth of Community in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (Sukjoo Sohn) 101 Transcultural Scenarios in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and Neil Bissoondath’s A Casual Brutality (Adriana Elena Stoican) 113 Householder Disintegration and Awakening of Feminine Consciousness: Shashi Desphande’s A Matter of Time (Mark Fabiano) 125 Identity, Language and Power in Suniti Namjoshi (Serena Guarracino) 134 Excessive Desire, Shattered Identities: The Outsider’s Agency in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (Anna Paige Rogers) 146 The Taboo in Indian Literature in English: Expanded Ways of Writing and Reading Indianness (Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar) 164 The Cultural Overcoat in Lahiri’s The Namesake: Diasporic Experience and the Transnational Moment (Hrishikesh Ingle) 176 “A Race of Angels”: The Dialectic of Liminality in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (Chetan Deshmane) 186 Bibliography 203 About the Contributors 213 Index 215
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Indic Literature History and Criticism India in Literature