India’s Literary History - Essays on the Nineteenth Century

India’s Literary History - Essays on the Nineteenth Century

Product ID: 13052

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Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor(s): Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 515
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240564

Description

The recent convergence of literary and historical theory has made literary history one of the most exciting fields in the humanities. New frameworks for understanding literature and its relation to history have emerged. The cultural conditions of creating text as well as the textual production of cultural meaning are now important aspects of literary history.

This book, the first major reassessment of literary history in nineteenth-century India for a generation, opens up this emerging field of literary history to nineteenth-century India. Its essays emphasise the making of literary history, the process of canonization, the reinvention of literary tradition, and the writing of literary history itself. A central premise of the book is that when European literary cultures arrived in India, they came into contact with popular performance forms and complex literary cultures that had their own histories. The essays also reach beyond the obvious genres and include little-known texts, situating hem within a wider debate about national origins, linguistic identities, and political entitlements.

Spanning a range of topics-print culture and oral tales, drama and gender, library use and publishing history, theatre and audiences, detective fiction and low-caste novels-this book will appeal to historians, cultural theorists, sociologists, and all interested in understanding the multiplicity of India’s cultural traditions and literary histories.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes of contributors

Introduction

PERFORMANCE AND IDENTITY

Between Print and Performance
Language, Community and the Theatrical Public
Impersonation, Narration, Desire, and the Persi Theatre

PRINT AND PROSE NARRATIVES

The Burden of Authenticity
Print and Prose
Entertainment and Reform
Multiple Temporalities, Unsettled Boundaries, Trickster Women

PUBLICATION, CIRCULATION, AND CONTROL

Hindi Publishing in the Heart of an Indo-Persian Cultural Metropolis
Reading in the Public Eye

THE GENRES OF THE NEW CITY

Dalpatram and the Nature of Literary Shifts in Nineteenth-century Ahmedabad
The Modern Babu and the Metropolis
Generic Questions
Detective Novels
A Place Elsewhere