Self, nation, text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children / Neil Ten Kortenaar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kortenaar, Neil ten.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nationalism in literature.

Self in literature.

India--In literature.

India.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's children.

Rushdie, Salman.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (326 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Montr?eal ; London ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel. Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory, and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts of postcolonial theory, ten Kortenaar reads Midnight's Children as an allegory of history, as a Bildungsroman and psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the nation. He shows that the hybridity of Rushdie's fictional India is not created by different elements forming a whole but by the relationship among them. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children also makes an original argument about how nation-states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the Common Man at the mercy of the state. Ten Kortenaar reveals Rushdie's India to be more self-conscious than many communal identities based on language: it is an India haunted by a dark twin called Pakistan; a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan and a specific subjective location.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Words and the World

Hybridity

The Allegory of History

Magic Realism

The Self and the World

Bildungsroman

Parts and Whole

Lack and Desire

Women

The Nation and Its Others

The State

Communalism

Pakistan and Purity

England and Mimicry

The Dispossessed and Romance

Hindu India

Cosmopolitanism and Objectivity

Conclusion

Glossary for Salman Rushdie’s

References

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [299]-309) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-86152-2

9786612861529

0-7735-7150-7

OCLC:

76898694