Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

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Author: Meenakshi Mukherjee
Publisher: Pencraft International
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185753288

Description

This volume brings together ten essays on Midnight’s Children (1980) and an interview with Salman Rushdie that discuss this seminal novel from different perspectives. Rushdie’s innovative use of history and memory, his experiments with language and narrative mode, the novel’s status as the paradigmatic post-colonial text, its inter-textuality and self-reflexivity, the influences on the novel as well as its influence on subsequent novels, the author’s relationship with India as an insider-outsider are some of the many issues explored by the critics.

Nearly two decades have passed since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) – a long enough period for us to gain a critical distance from the text. The novel rode a crest of popularity in the early eighties – in India as well as in other English-knowing countries-aided undoubtedly by the Booker Prize, but unlike most such award-induced successes, Rushdie’s book continued to be read and discussed long after it disappeared from the best-seller lists. In fact the more serious interpretations of the book began only when the reviews, interviews and other media coverage of the author and his promotion tours around the world were over. Initially seen as merely a comic, irreverent and high-spirited novel about a fantastic protagonist whose birth coincided with the independence of India, Midnight’s Children was gradually appropriated into a theoretical discourse about nation, history and their narratives. The novel has been claimed as the paradigmatic post-colonial text subverting the notions of received historiography and indigenising both the language and the narrative mode of the colonizing culture.

The present volume brings together ten essays and one interview that discuss Midnight’s Children from different viewpoints. These are chosen out of scores of available pieces not necessarily because these are the best, (although they may well turn out to be that as well) but because these best represent the range and diversity of the ways of looking at the novel.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Midnight’s Children and the Allegory of History

History as Gossip in Midnight’s Children

Salman the Funtoosh: Magic Bilingualism in Midnight’s Children

The Art of Suspense: Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-) Nights

Midnight’s Children and Tristram Shandy

Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Intertextual Strategies in Midnight’s Children and the Tin Drum

The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children and its Indian Con-Texts

Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Children

Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties

Doing the Dangerous Thing: An Interview with Salman Rushdie

Works by Salman Rushdie

Select Bibliography

Contributors