What do R.K. Narayan, G.V. Desani, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose, Suniti Namjoshi, and Salman Rushdie have in common? They represent Indian writing in English over five decades. Vilified by many cultural nationalists for not writing in native languages, they nonetheless present a critique of the historical and cultural conditions that promoted and sustained writing in English. They also have in common a counterrealist aesthetic that asks its own social, political, and textual questions. This book is about the need to look at the tradition of Indian writing in English from the perspective of counterrealism. The departure from the conventions of mimetic writing not only challenges the limits of realism but also enables Indo-Anglian authors to access formative areas of colonial experience. Kanaganayakam analyzes the fiction of writers who work in this vibrant Indo-Anglian tradition and demonstrates patterns of continuity and change during the last five decades. Each chapter draws attention to what is distinctive about the artifice in each author while pointing to the features that connect them. The book concludes with a study of contemporary writing and its commitment to non-mimetic forms.

Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.

Early twentieth-century Indian novels often depict the harsh material conditions of life under British colonial rule. Even so, these 'realist' novels are profoundly imaginative. In this study, Ulka Anjaria challenges the distinction between early twentieth-century social realism and modern-day magical realism, arguing that realism in the colony functioned as a mode of experimentation and aesthetic innovation – not merely as mimesis of the 'real world'. By examining novels from the 1930s across several Indian languages, Anjaria reveals how Indian authors used realist techniques to imagine alternate worlds, to invent new subjectivities and relationships with the Indian nation and to question some of the most entrenched values of modernity. Addressing issues of colonialism, Indian nationalism, the rise of Gandhi, religion and politics, and the role of literature in society, Anjaria's careful analysis will complement graduate study and research in English literature, South Asian studies and postcolonial studies.

This study establishes connections between the themes and methodologies of writers within the South Asian diaspora in the New World, and serves both serious analysts as well as beginning readers of South Asian fiction. It is an impartial study that analyzes the stylistic excellence of South Asian fiction and the clearly emergent motifs of the writers, recognizing the value of the interplay of cultural differences and the need for resolution of those differences. The book begins with a discussion of the works of Indo-Caribbean novelists Samuel Selvon and V.S. Naipaul, author of A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival, thereby establishing parallels between the immigration patterns of the South Asian diaspora who first emigrated to the Caribbean long before significant numbers of South Asians came to the United States. Next, the fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Heat and Dust), the non-fictional narratives of Ved Mehta (Face to Face), and the satire and social criticism of Bharati Mukherjee (Wife) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Sister of My Heart) are discussed. New literary voices such as those of Bapsi Sidhwa (An American Brat), Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, whose characters, plots and themes deal with universal human experiences, Akhil Sharma, Manil Suri and Samrat Upadhyay are studied for the new directions and new methods they offer. A sub-genre of young adult fiction is discovered in the novels of Dhan Gopal Mukerji, such as in his Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, and more recently in the works of Mitali Perkins and Indi Rana. Recent expatriate novelists from South Asia such as Anita Desai, Amitav Chosh, Vikram Chandra and the American editions of Vikram Seth's novels are appraised together with contemporary Indo-Canadian novelists and Indo-Caribbean novelists resident in Canada.

Genres of Emergency offers literary genre as a way to understand and negotiate the varied states of emergency and crisis that have become a fixture of our contemporary world. Building on a critical study of the literature written during and about the State of Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India (1975 - 1977), the study establishes emergency and its genres as an important interpretative site: an exceptionally violent episode marked as a one-off crisis, which also functions as a locus for an ongoing renegotiation of a modern polity and culture. Reading a wide-ranging archive of English-language texts - from prison memoir to popular magazine, from high-brow literary fiction to boilerplate thriller, from the unrelentingly realistic to the mythically allegorical - Genres of Emergency traces the tension between crisis and continuity that these genres mediate. In addressing this tension, the authors of Emergency fiction take seriously the genres in which they write and use them to mobilize literary conventions as political interventions. More specifically, these novels use the conventions of realism, epic, allegory, and the thriller to reach back in time and across cultures and languages, invoking past iterations of these genres and histories and anticipating those to come. Combining literary criticism with cultural history, Genres of Emergency thus has implications for the study of literary genre, for the historical events that these genres recount, and for understanding the politics of literary form.

"Postnational Feminisms: Postcolonial Identities and Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Kamala Markandaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Anita Desai offers a significant contribution to the field of postcolonial and Third World feminist studies. It reevaluates the ways in which Third World women writers interrogate the relationship between woman and nation in the postcolonial context. Hena Ahmad brings forth the concept of "postnational feminism", which she deploys to show how these major writers challenge the role of women as signifiers of national cultures in their works. This innovative concept illuminates the ambivalence of these uniquely positioned writers as Ahmad explores the connection between postnationalism and Third World feminism." -- BOOK JACKET.

As the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naïve, anachronistic, deceptive, or complicit with colonial discourse; in other words—incongruous with the postcolonial. This book argues that postcolonial realism is intimately connected to the specifically political in the sense that realist form is premised on the idea of a collective reality. Discussing a range of literary and theoretical works, Dr. Sorensen exemplifies that many postcolonial writers were often faced with the realities of an unstable state, a divided community inhabiting a contested social space, the challenges of constructing a notion of ‘the people,’ often out of a myriad of local communities with different traditions and languages brought together arbitrarily through colonization. The book demonstrates that the political context of realism is the sphere or possibility of civil war, divided societies, and unstable communities. Postcolonial realism is prompted by disturbing political circumstances, and it gestures toward a commonly imagined world, precisely because such a notion is under pressure or absent.

Now available in a single volume paperback, this advanced reference resource for the novel and novel theory offers authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, and genre of the novel, in over 140 articles of 500-7,000 words. Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world; formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator); technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure and style); subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel; theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel; book history; and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines. The Encyclopedia is arranged in A-Z format and features entries from an international cast of over 140 scholars, overseen by an advisory board of 37 leading specialists in the field, making this the most authoritative reference resource available on the novel. This essential reference, now available in an easy-to-use, fully indexed single volume paperback, will be a vital addition to the libraries of literature students and scholars everywhere.

Indian writers of English such as G. V. Desani, Salman Rushdie, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra and Jhumpa Lahiri have taken the potentialities of the novel form to new heights. Against the background of the genre’s macro-history, this study attempts to explain the stunning vitality, colourful diversity, and the outstanding but sometimes controversial success of postcolonial Indian novels in the light of ongoing debates in postcolonial studies. It analyses the warp and woof of the novelistic text through a cross-sectional scrutiny of the issues of democracy, the poetics of space, the times of empire, nation and globalization, self-writing in the auto/meta/docu-fictional modes, the musical, pictorial, cinematic and culinary intertextualities that run through this hyperpalimpsestic practice and the politics of gender, caste and language that gives it an inimitable stamp. This concise and readable survey gives us intimations of a truly world literature as imagined by Francophone writers because the postcolonial Indian novel is a concrete illustration of how “language liberated from its exclusive pact with the nation can enter into a dialogue with a vast polyphonic ensemble.”

Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography explores some of the latest developments in the literary and cultural practices of Canadians of Asian heritage. While earlier work by ethnic, multicultural, or minority writers in Canada was often concerned with immigration, the moment of arrival, issues of assimilation, and conflicts between generations, literary and cultural production in the new millennium no longer focuses solely on the conflict between the Old World and the New or the clashes between culture of origin and adopted culture. No longer are minority authors identifying simply with their ethnic or racial cultural background in opposition to dominant culture. The essays in this collection explore ways in which Asian Canadian authors (such as Larissa Lai, Shani Mootoo, Fred Wah, Hiromi Goto, Suniti Namjoshi, and Ying Chen) and artists (such as Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Laiwan) have gone beyond what Françoise Lionnet calls autoethnography, or ethnographic autobiography. They demonstrate the ways representations of race and ethnicity, particularly in works by Asian Canadians in the last decade, have changed have become more playful, untraditional, aesthetically and ideologically transgressive, and exciting.