About the Book
This book has grown out of a felt-need to rethink and re-evaluate the forces that have been at work shaping the literature of the last decade of the 20th century—literature written in English. There is no denying that what had largely emerged as insurgent writing, especially focusing on the socio-political realities of our country, has today gained wider ground, acceptability and acclaim. It has become a vehicle of articulating awareness, voicing dissatisfaction and reviewing historical and philosophical truths. In its long-strided progress Indian Writing in English has not overlooked the literary canons and in the directions it has taken, it has created not only a niche for itself but also made a discernible mark on literary theory. The essays included in this volume represent the multiple ways in which we view our literature.
Contents
1 Towards the 21st Century: The Writing of the 1990s / Jasbir Jain
2 What Now, Masters of Muse: An Overview of IEP / Mukherjee
3 Landscapes: A Landmark in Keki Daruwalla’s Poetry / Asha Viswas
4 The Indian English Novel of the 1990s / Viney Kirpal
5 Gender and Literary Sensibility / Namita Gokhale
6 Infidel Heteroglossia? Postmodernist Feminist: Configurations in Githa Hariharan’s The Art of Dying / Rajul Bhargava
7 Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Study / Ramesh K. Srivastava
8 The Goddess of Small Things / A.K. Tiwari
9 The Poetry of the Unsaid in Arundhati Roy’s: The God of Small Things / Sanjay Kumar
10 Women Novelists and the St Stephen’s School / Shyamala A. Narayan
11 Crossing Patriarchal Threshold: Glimpses of the Incipient: New Woman in Manju Kapoor’s Difficult Daughters / Seema Malik
12 Quest for Self and the Immigrant Experience in Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction / Pradeep Trikha
13 Body as Object: A Reading of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s: What the Body Remembers / Seema Malik
14 The Question of Indianness / S. Sharma
15 The Nation and the Anglo-Indian: A Study of The Trotter-Nama / Shyamala A. Narayan
16 The English Burden alias the Burden of English / Chakarvorty
17 Looking into History: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace / Santosh Gupta
18 Amitav Ghosh: Transfiguration of Memory in The Shadow Lines / Meetu Bhatia
19 Literature and Ideology: A Study of Romen Basu’s Blackstone and K.A. Abbas’ The Naxalites / H.S. Chandalia
20 Harvesting a Mephistophelian Deal: Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest / Arun Soule
About the Author / Editor
Rajul Bhargava, former Head, Department of English, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur is an internationally acclaimed scholar with specialisation both in Linguistics and Literature. Recipient of the New York State Scholarship, the Charles Walcott Trust Grant, the Ray Tongue Bursary, she has travelled widely in India and abroad on important academic assignments and has been on many prestigious positions on various important committees and boards. She is the Founder and Editor of Voices, a bi-annual journal, since 2011 and has organised intent-based Roundtables under its aegis. Her areas of interest span from Critical Theory to Postmodernist Dialectic.
