Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market delves into the influences and pressures of the marketplace on this genre, which this volume contends has been both gatekeeper as well as a significant force in shaping the production and consumption of this literature.

Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.

Combining analysis with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book assesses how postcolonial writers respond to their own reception and niche positioning, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, within a global marketplace.

At its most basic, re-Orientalism is defined as forms of Orientalism practiced and manifested by Orientals in representing the Orient. This book looks at the application and discourse of re-Orientalism in contemporary Indian and South Asian writing in English, particularly social realism fiction.

This book examines the use of book covers as marketing devices, asking what exactly they communicate to their readers and buyers, and what images they associate with a genre and create about a culture. Focusing on Indian women's writing in English, it combines the study of text with the study of materiality of the book.

Today, Indian writing in English is a fi eld of study that cannot be overlooked. Whereas at the turn of the 20th century, writers from India who chose to write in English were either unheeded or underrated, with time the literary world has been forced to recognize and accept their contribution to the corpus of world literatures in English. Showcasing the burgeoning field of Indian English writing, this encyclopedia documents the poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists of Indian origin since the pre-independence era and their dedicated works. Written by internationally recognized scholars, this comprehensive reference book explores the history and development of Indian writers, their major contributions, and the critical reception accorded to them. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English will be a valuable resource to students, teachers, and academics navigating the vast area of contemporary world literature.

This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.

The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.

Radical universalism vs postcolonial theory The World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques the valorization of the local in cultural theories typically accompanied by a rejection of universal categories - viewed as Eurocentric projections. But the privileging of the local usually amounts to an exercise in exoticization of the South. The book argues that the rejection of Eurocentric theories can be complemented by embracing another, richer and non-parochial form of universalism. Through readings of texts from India, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Egypt, the book shows that the fine grained engagement with culture, the mapping of ordinary lives not just as objects but subjects of their history, is embedded in much of postcolonial literature in a radical universalism - one that is rooted in local realities, but is able to unearth in them the needs, conflicts and desires that stretch across cultures and time. It is a universalism recognized by Marx and steeped in the spirit of anti-colonialism, but hostile to any whiff of exoticism.

Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts is a volume which examines the linguistic and stylistic forms of Indian English in new fictional texts to explore the power of language to construct meaning, express identity, and convey ideology. Specifically, this study proposes the elaboration and application of postcolonial stylistics, i.e. an interdisciplinary methodology that uses different disciplines, such as literary linguistics and postcolonial studies as a critical lens to read contemporary Indian authors like Jeet Thayil, Deepa Anappara, Avni Doshi, Tabish Khair, and Megha Majumdar. The linguistic fabric of their fiction is investigated in a series of case studies, observing the stylistic rendition of a wide range of themes and tropes, such as the representation of Otherness, drug discourse, lament and the senses, which cumulatively portray aspects of the current Indian narrative scenario. The book develops ideas growing out of several disciplines to reach a fuller understanding of cultural phenomena in the postcolonial context, and by extension in the social world.