This Volume Explores How The ýWestý Has Been Written Into Indian Literary Texts And Other Cultural Productions. The Twelve Essays Included Here, Written By Literary Critics, Cultural Historians And Film Theorists, Examine Patterns In IndiaýS Perception And Creative Representation Of The West, Each Focusing On A Specific Linguistic Context: Asamiya, Bangla, Hindi, Oriya, Telugu And Urdu Besides Indian Writing In English. Though Dealing With Different Regions And Languages, Most Of These Papers Demonstrate The Limits Contemporary Postcolonial Theorizations And Urge The Need For A Reconceptualization Of The Theories Of Colonial Encounter In Order To Account For The Ways In Which India Imagined And Imaged The West And Its Civilization.

On the completion of fiftieth year of Sahitya Akademi.

This book offers a comprehensive appraisal of the relatively unexplored but highly impactful women’s association, the Assam Mahila Samiti which led one of the most remarkable women’s movements in colonial India. Central to the Assam Mahila Samiti story is its founding Secretary, the firebrand feminist Chandraprava Saikiani (1901-72) who, despite being an unwed mother and belonging to a lower caste, was a celebrated writer, a polemical columnist, and a successful publicist of two vernacular magazines in the 1940s. The book traverses these individual and collective journeys from the 1920s to the 1950s, exploring their negotiations with the complex terrain of the multi-ethnic Brahmaputra valley during the highly politicised period of the anti-colonial movement. It argues that theoretical understanding of the term public sphere may be enriched through an engagement with rare archival materials of these middle class women’s associations’ hand written minutes of meetings in a local language in early twentieth-century colonial India and posits that gender may not function merely as constitutive of the public, but how women’s collectives may shape, transform and orchestrate a veritable gendered public, resistant to both native patriarchy and sometimes to colonial authority.

Winner of the 2006 NSW Prize for Literary Scholarship. The work of Joseph Conrad has been read so disparately that it is tempting to talk of many different Conrads. One lasting impression however, is that his colonial novels, which record encounters between Europe and Europe’s ‘Other’, are highly significant for the field of post-colonial studies. Drawing on many years of research and a rich body of criticism, Postcolonial Conrad not only presents fresh readings of his novels of imperialism, but also maps and analyzes the interpretative tradition they have generated. Terry Collits first examines the reception of the author’s work in terms of the history of ideas, literary criticism, traditions of ‘Englishness’, Marxism and post-colonialism, before re-reading Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo and Victory in greater depth. Collits’ incisive and wide-ranging volume provides a much needed reconsideration of more than a century of criticism, discussing the many different perspectives born of constantly shifting contexts. Most importantly though, the book encourages and equips us for twenty-first criticism, where we must ask anew how we might read and understand these crucial and fascinating novels.

“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

One number each year includes Annual bibliography of Commonwealth literature.

For centuries, travelers have made Central Asia known to the wider world through their writings. In this volume, scholars employ these little-known texts in a wide range of Asian and European languages to trace how Central Asia was gradually absorbed into global affairs. The representations of the region brought home to China and Japan, India and Persia, Russia and Great Britain, provide valuable evidence that helps map earlier periods of globalization and cultural interaction.

The final volume of René Wellek's monumental history of modern criticism is a comprehensive survey of the main currents of twentieth-century criticism in Western Europe. In this volume, as in the preceding books of the series, Wellek expounds and analyzes the work of the most prominent critics, offering succinct appraisals of his subjects both as individuals and as participants in the broader movements of the century. Contents I. French Criticism, 1900-1950 French Classical Criticism in the Twentieth Century Retrospect: Alain, Rémy de Gourmont The Nouvelle Revue Française: André Gide, Jacques Rivière, Ramón Fernández, Benjamin Crémiuex, Albert Thibaudet Marcel Proust The Catholic Renaissance: Charles Du Bos, Jacques Maritain and Henri Bremond, Paul Claudel Dada and Surrealism The Geneva School: Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet Albert Camus Jean-Paul Sartre Paul Valéry Prospect II. Italian Criticism, 1900-1950 Benedetto Croce The Followers of Croce: Luigi Russo, Francesco Flora, Mario Fubini, Attilio Momigliano The Aestheticians: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Alfredo Gargiulo Critics concerned with English and American literature: Cesare Pavese, Mario Praz, Emilio Cecchi Italian Marxism: Antonio Gramesci, Giacomo Debenedetti The Catholic Renaissance: Carlo Bo The Close Readers: Renato Serra, Giuseppe De Robertis, Cesare De Lollis, Eugenio Montale III. Spanish Criticism, 1900-1950 Américo Castro Miguel de Unamuno Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Ramón Menéndez Pidal Azorín Salvador de Madariaga Jorge Guillén Dámaso Alonso José Ortega y Gasset

The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.