Untouchable fictions : literary realism and the crisis of caste / Toral Jatin Gajarawala.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gajarawala, Toral Jatin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indic literature--Dalit authors--History and criticism.

Indic literature.

Indic fiction--History and criticism.

Indic fiction.

Realism in literature.

Dalits in literature.

Caste in literature.

Modernism (Literature)--India.

Modernism (Literature).

Indic literature--Dalit authors.

India.

Physical Description:

x, 258 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism-progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental-in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable" caste) fiction. Drawing on a wide array of fiction from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce?

Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text and its radical critique with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and ground-breaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under Gajarawala's lens the aesthetic languages of Hindi and English are interwined, and caste becomes a central category of literary analysis.

This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, and cultural studies, makes a crucial intervention into studies of literary realism and will be important for all readers interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics and between social movements and cultural production. Book jacket.

Contents:

Burnings: an introduction

The Dalit limit point: realism, representation, and crisis in Premchand

Modernism, Marxism, metaphor: the origins of a literary politics of particularism

A perfect whole: knowledge by transcription and rural regionalism

Casteless modernities: the contemporary anglophone novel and its invisible interlocutors

Some time between revisionist and revolutionary . . . : reading history in Dalit textuality

Mimesis: the representation of reality in other literatures

Epilogue: aesthetics and their afterlives.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823245246

0823245241

9780823245253

082324525X

OCLC:

785077518