The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal : Becoming Readers in Colonial India / Sunayani Bhattacharya.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bhattacharya, Sunayani.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bengali fiction--Appreciation--19th century.

Bengali fiction.

Books and reading.

India.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (232 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing (US), 2023.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

System Details:

text file HTML

Summary:

How does a reader learn to read an unfamiliar genre? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal answers this question by looking at the readers of some of the first Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Moving from the world of novels, periodicals, letters, and reviews to that of colonial educational policies, this book provides a rich literary history of the reading lives of some of the earliest novel readers in colonial India. Sunayani Bhattacharya studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading; how they approached the thorny question of influence; and uncovers that they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose attendant traditions formed not a distant past, but coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present. Challenging dominant postcolonial scholarship, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal engages with the lived experience of colonial modernity as it traces the import of the Bengali reader's choices on her quotidian life, and grants access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is to be found enmeshed with the present.

Contents:

Acknowledgments Introduction: Establishing the Problem - Reading as a Practice 1. Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers: Battala Literature, Colonial Pedagogy, and the Idea of Education 2. Becoming a Reader: Letters, Reviews, and Memories of Reading 3. Dear Reader, Good Sir: The Reader and Bankim's Novels 4. Another World of Reading: Hossain and Islamic Bengali Prose Conclusion: The Novelty of Reading Bibliography Index

ISBN:

9781501398490

OCLC:

1365062314

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.