Author: GJV Prasad
Publisher: Pencraft International
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 191
ISBN/UPC (if available): 818575361X
Description
This collection of essays explores the world of Vikram Seth with critical readings of his major works. Seth’s position in the pantheon of Indian English writing, his poetic craft, his responses to contemporary codes of relationships, his notations as a postcolonial writer living in and writing about various countries, and his politics are all examines closely by the scholars who have contributed to this volume.
They engage with his works from various critical and ideological positions, from the aesthetic to the postcolonial to the ecological. The aim of the dozen chapters in this collection is to open various windows into Seth’s world to enhance the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the work of this highly talented and most accessible writer.
This is the one nagging question that runs through out the volume-the question of location, where do we place Vikram Seth? Where does he belong and who does he address? His works give you the dominant feel and pulse of a place at a certain time; he gives you live led in particular mode in a specific locale in all detail. It can be the world of the whites or the browns or any other colour. Seth treats all the world that he knows as his stage and all the people there as legitimately his characters.
This collection of essays attempts to cover all aspects of Seth’s works. However, such a collection can never claim to have said the last word on any writer, especially not Seth. Seth after all is a writer who is continuing to enthrall the world and surely has many more books in a gap in our understanding and appreciation of one of the foremost writers in English of our times.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
A Different Gaze: Vikram Seth’s Journey through Mainland China
The Solitary Wanderer-The Seth of the Garden
No Golden Gate for Indian English Poetry? Reading Vikram Seth’s Novel in Verse in the Context of Indian Poetry in English
A Metrosexual Lovestory
Protocols of Poetry: A Study of Vikram Seth’s All You Who Sleep Tonight
Secularism in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
Temporality, and the Transition to Modernity in A Suitable Boy
History, Politics, and Romance in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
Land as Legislative Space in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Phanishwarnath Renu’s Maila ancal
The Mighty World of the eye and the Ear: Nature in An Equal Music
An Englishman’s Novel? Vikram Seth’s an Equal Music
The Complex Case of Vikram Seth: Questioning the International in An Equal Music
Select Bibliography
Contributors