Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre. By viewing the novel as much more than an aesthetic form, this landmark collection demonstrates how the genre has transformed human emotions and behavior, and the very perception of reality. Historical, statistical, and formal analyses show the novel as a complex literary system, in which new forms proliferate in every period and place. Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world. These books will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literature.

"The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship on regional language literary productions (in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), the critical works and the surveys focus only on that particular language and therefore frequently suffer from a lack of comparative breadth and/or global access. Both reflect the paradigm of monolingualism within which much literary scholarship on Indian literature takes place. This handbook instead focuses on the multilingual pathways through which modern Indian literature gets constituted. It features cutting-edge literary criticism from at least seventeen languages, and on traditional literary genres as well as more recent ones like graphic novels. It shows the deep connections and collaborations across genres, languages, nations, and regions that produce a literature of diverse contact zones, generating innovations on form, aesthetics, and technique. Foregrounding themes such as modernity and modernism, gender, caste, diaspora, and political resistance, the book collects an array of perspectives on this vast topic"--

This book is a comprehensive critical re-reading of Nayantara Sahgal’s oeuvre. One of the most significant Indian English writers, her fictional and non-fictional engagement with historical events and political dilemmas inextricably links her to the colonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial discourse in India. Drawing transcontinental connections with the ideas of Fanon, Foucault, Said, Beauvoir, White, Beck and Habermas the monograph juxtaposes recurring themes in her writing with the ideas of significant Indian post-colonial commentators. Tracing the subliminal tendencies in her writing to Gandhian humanity and Nehruvian pragmaticism, the book moves beyond clichés of feminist criticism and genealogical ties to unveil a unique artist who has folded nearly a century of Indian experience in her work. Drawing on novels, essays, speeches, journalism and interviews by Nayantara Sahgal, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of South Asian literature, post-colonialism, politics and contemporary history/culture/change.

This book argues that modernity in postcolonial India has been synonymous with catastrophe and crisis. Focusing on the literary works of the 1943 Bengal Famine, the 1967–72 Naxalbari Movement, and the 1975–77 Indian Emergency, it shows that there is a long-term, colonially-engineered agrarian crisis enabling these catastrophic events. Novelists such as Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Nabarun Bhattacharya, and Nayantara Sahgal, among others, have captured the relationship between the long-term crisis and the catastrophic aspects of the events through different aesthetic modalities within realism, ranging from analytical-affective, critical realist, quest modes to apparently non-realist ones such as metafictional, urban fantastic, magical realist, and others. These realist modalities are together read here as postcolonial catastrophic realism.

Raja Rao Is An Erudite Scholar And An Ennobling Indian Novelist In English. His Sensibility Is Verily Indian And Presents A Unified Vision Of Life.His Creditable Career As A Novelist, Beginning With His First Novel Kanthapura (1938), Spans Over Almost More Than Half A Century. The Novel Is A Repository Of The Eventful Phases Of Indian S Struggle For Independence On Gandhian Lines. The Novel Merits The Distinction Of Being A Paradigmatic Text With The Deft Handling Of Myth And History.The Serpent And The Rope (1960) Renowned For Its Metaphysical Moorings Is A Compendium Of The Indian Composite Cultural Complexities Interacting As They Do With The Cross Cultural And Transactional Influences. The Text Holds Out Infinite Possibilities For The Intending Readers Set Out To Undertake A Serious Study.The Cat And Shakespeare (1965), Comrade Kirillov (1976) Are Intact With The Solidity Of An Inbuilt Structural Irony And Put Up An Amazing Picture, In An Amusing Manner, Of The Piquant Situation Obtaining All Over India In The Post-Independence Period, Soon After The Euphoria Of Independence Struggle Ceased To Exercise Its Influence.The Study Being Selective, Is Confined To Socio-Cultural Aspects Of Life As Reflected In The Above Texts.

Ecofeminism and the Indian Novel tests the theories of ecofeminism against the background of India’s often different perceptions of environmental problems, challenging the hegemony of Western culture in thinking about human problems. This book moves beyond a simple application of the concepts of ecofeminism, instead explaining the uniqueness of Indian novels as narratives of ecofeminism and how they can contribute to the development of the theory of ecofeminism. In examining a selection of novels, the author argues that Indian texts conceptualize the ecological crisis more as a human problem than as a gender problem. The book proposes that we should think of ecofeminism as ecohumanism instead, seeing human beings and nature as a part of a complex web. Novels analysed within the text include Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Shivram Karanth’s Return to Earth (2002) and Na D’Souza’s Dweepa (2013). Ecofeminism and the Indian Novel will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecofeminism, ecocriticism, ecological feminism, environmental humanities, gender studies, ecological humanities, feminist studies and Indian literature.

A History of the Indian Novel in English traces the development of the Indian novel from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up until the present day. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes extensive essays that shed light on the legacy of English in Indian writing. Organized thematically, these essays examine how English was "made Indian" by writers who used the language to address specifically Indian concerns. Such concerns revolved around the question of what it means to be modern as well as how the novel could be used for anti-colonial activism. By the 1980s, the Indian novel in English was a global phenomenon, and India is now the third largest publisher of English-language books. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History invites readers to question conventional accounts of India's literary history.

The Book Is Be A Valuable Addition To The World Of Literary Criticism And Of Immense Utility To Those Who Want To Further Explore The Areas Of Critical Exposition Of Anand S Life And Works.The Book Will Be Found Of Great Interest By The Students Of English Literature, Researchers And The General Readers.

The Book Aims At An Evaluation Of The Novels Of Kamala Markandaya In The Perspective Of Class-Consciousness Embedded In Her Fictional Narrative. The Study Attempts To Explore The Impact Of Class-Consciousness On The Attitudes, Manners And Conditions Of Living In The Context Of Modern India As It Moves From A Conservative And Traditional Social Order To A Liberal And Urbanised Socio-Economic And Cultural Ethos. It Seeks To Explore Markandaya S Concern With The Predicament Of The Individual In A Class-Ridden Society Subjected To A Process Of Radical Change. An Attempt Has Been Made To Substantiate The Hypothesis That In The Process Of This Change, The Self Confronts Tensions, Uncertainties And Conflicts That Lead To Deep Psychological And Spiritual Wounds. The Self, With Its Desires, Instincts And Dreams, Encounters A World Of Reality Governed By Social, Economic And Cultural Forces. This Encounter Leads To A Crisis Of Identity. The Self Tries To Surmount This Crisis Through Resistance Or Reconciliation, Through Protest Or Surrender. In This Process Of Self S Grappling With Reality, There Is Anguish And Suffering. This Study, In Short, Is An Attempt To Exploring The Paradox Of Human Condition In Terms Of Conflict Between Self And Society, Between Free Will And Necessity.