Author: Meenakshi Mukherjee
Editor: Meenakshi Mukherjee
Meenakshi Mukherjee
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 273
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126013427
Description
This volume brings together fourteen essays written by literary critics, historians and political theorists which look at the early novels in different Indian languages and the circumstances of their production.
This volume brings together fourteen essays written by literary critics, historians and political theorists which look at the early novels in different Indian languages and the circumstances of their production. Most of the essays challenge the old assumption that the novel in India was a genre directly imported from the West, and address the issues of plural heritage and the economic and social determinants that interacted to make the shaping of this literary form a tangled and complex process in our languages.
Contents
Introduction
Reformulating the Questions
SECTION I: CONTEXT
Early Asamiya Novels: New Genre, Traditional Mindset and Changing perspective
The Novel in Bangla: The First Steps
No, Not the Nation: Lower Caste Malayalam Novels of the Nineteenth Century
Two Sentences: A Speculation on Genre in Early Marathi Novels
Fiction and the Tamil Reading Public: The Inter-War Period
The Birth of a Genre: Telugu Novel in the Nineteenth Century
First Urdu Novel: Contesting Claims and Disclaimers
SECTION II: TEXTS
The Allegory of ‘Rajmohan’s wife (1864)’: National Culture and Colonialism in Asia’s First English Novel
Seeing and Reading: The Early Malayalam Novel and Some Questions of Visibility
Govardhanram Tripathi and ‘The Philosophy of Consumption’: A Reading of ‘Sarasvatichandra’
Colonial Modernity and the social Reformist Novel: Reading ‘Indira Bai’ (1899)
Aap Beeti or Jag Beeti: Narration and Reality in Umrao Jan Ada (1899)
Chha Mana Atha Guntha: The Language of Power and the Silences of a Woman
Chronological List of Early Narratives
Contributors
Index