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.

The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways.

The present state of research in precarity demands meta-questions and hence we need to probe both philosophy and practice in light of precarity’s different manifestations. The plural perspectives by which this phenomenon can be addressed also suggest potential for further theorization alongside that of Butler and her critics. By inviting scholars and experts from different fields and disciplines, and by applying multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of our precarious world, while providing insights into the challenges of our possible futures.

The relationship between critical disability studies and the hearing sciences is a dynamic one, and it’s changing still, both as clinicians come to terms with the evolving health of deaf and hearing communities and as the ‘social’ and ‘medical’ understandings of disability continue to gain traction among different groups. What might a ‘cultural’ approach to these overlapping areas of study involve? And what could narrative prose in particular have to tell us that other sources haven’t sensed? At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so – through serials, short stories, circadian fiction, narrative history, morality tales, whodunits, Bildungsromane, life-writing, the Great American Novel – the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Since medieval times, English literature has often demonized Muslims. The term ‘Islamophobia’ is recent, but the phenomenon is old. This survey of literature focusing on the modern period up to 1914 identifies negative ideas about Islam in novels and plays. Some works are iconic, some more obscure. However, the book highlights writers who challenged stereotypes and tended to see Muslims as equally capable of virtue and vice as Christians and others. The book deals with the role of the imagination in depicting others and how this serves authors’ agendas. The conclusion brings the book’s thesis into dialogue with the debate in the USA today between supporters of multiculturalism and its critics. Anyone interested in how stereotypes are formed, perpetuated and can be challenged will profit from this book. It is aimed at a non-specialist readership.

Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature conducts an expansive exploration of different modes of timing. Its seven chapters pursue the question of time as it is embodied in key figures that shape both aesthetic and pragmatic life. Working closely with literary, visual, and musical artworks, the book aims to provoke new ways of engaging with the question of time. It treats artworks as experiments that launch temporal figures, and that test out the possibilities and connections these different figures enable. Thus, the book seizes upon works by artists like Anne Carson, King Tubby, and Raymond Queneau as opportunities for thinking through the valence of both existing and untested temporal configurations. What other modes of shaping time, it asks, might be conjured out of the viewing of an Omer Fast film, the reading of a poem by Baudelaire, or of a novel by Tom McCarthy? In treating artworks as temporal experiments, this book stresses the fact that artworks always experiment with the raw materials of time, fashioning it or refashioning it into novel combinations. This book follows the imperatives of these experiments in order to advance a nuanced understanding of the way time insinuates itself into all aspects of social and intellectual life.

This manuscript argues for the importance of Günter Grass as a political thinker in addition to his status as a novelist and public intellectual, capable of forming ethical responses to contemporary issues like neoliberalism and place of the petit bourgeoisie in social life. I define Grass’s trajectory as a thinker through his novels and speeches. Primarily, I draw attention to the role memory plays in Grass’s thought: that his work represented an intellectual and aesthetic response to the role Nazism continued to play in West German politics in the post war era. To Grass, Nazism represented a resurgent threat unaddressed following the end of World War II. Later, Grass amended his concept of memory politics to address neoliberal capitalism, reiterating his radicalism and affirming the need for German society to resist the rise of extreme ideologies.

Indian English, or rather, the forms of English used in India, have long been a topic of interest for laymen and scholars. For generations, the 'exotic' nature of the transplanted language was commented on, often ridiculed as a matter of unintentional comic. It was only from the 1960s onwards that the local forms of English were recognized for what they are — adaptations of the world language to local needs, and varying to an enormous degree, depending on the speakers' (and writers') education and the uses they make of the language. This acknowledgement came mainly from abroad (and still does); Indians are much less willing to admit to the variation and its communicative functions in the country. Therefore, standard English (if possible in its classical British form) is generally favoured, together with formal written uses often based on the stylistic models provided by English literature from Shakespeare to Dickens. R.R. Mehrotra was one of the first to see the need for a proper sociolinguistic description of the Indian situation, and the forms and functions of English in this complex set-up. He has for a long time collected and analysed the huge range of English around him, with the aim of publishing a collection of texts that reflects the variation within the country along various dimensions, historical, regional, ethnic, social and stylistic. The present collection of texts is typical in many ways, evoking in the content, style and grammatical forms the contexts in which English functions; notes help to put the excerpts into the proper frame to make them intelligible to outsiders.

Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change offers the first comprehensive description of Indian English and its emerging regional standard in a corpus-linguistic framework. Drawing on a wealth of authentic spoken and written data from India (including the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English), this book explores the dynamics of variation and change in the vocabulary and grammar of contemporary Indian English. The aims are to document the extent of lexical and grammatical nativization at the beginning of the twenty-first century and compare contemporary Indian English to other varieties around the world (for example British and American English). The results are relevant to sociolinguists, variationists and lexicologists seeking to investigate ongoing language change in emerging standard varieties of English. With its strong empirical foundation and its comparative outlook, the book is also of interest to anyone looking for an introduction to the corpus-based description of varieties of English.