Download or read book Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political written by Eli Park Sorensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Realism Form and the Postcolonial Novel written by N. Robinette and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronted with apartheid, dictatorship or the sheer scale of global economics, realism can no longer function with the certainties of the nineteenth century. Free Realist Style considers how the style of the realist novel changes as its epistemological horizons narrow.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Historical Novel written by H. Dalley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Postcolonial Historical Novel is the first systematic work to examine how the historical novel has been transformed by its appropriation in postcolonial writing. It proposes new ways to understand literary realism, and explores how the relationship between history and fiction plays out in contemporary African and Australasian writing.
Download or read book Realism in the Twentieth Century Indian Novel written by Ulka Anjaria and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Postcolonial Studies and the Literary written by E. Sorensen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalization in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.
Download or read book The Order of Forms written by Anna Kornbluh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
Download or read book The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born written by Ayi Kwei Armah and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1988 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beginners' guide to the fundamentals of the Dru meditation technique, a method for soothing the mind and relaxing the emotions. The programme includes six short guided meditations designed to instill a sense of profound stillness, quieten and calm a stressed mind and reconnect with the important aspects of life. Each nine-minute meditations is based on one of the elements: Earth, Water, Light, Air and Sky.
Download or read book Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel written by Sourit Bhattacharya and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that modernity in postcolonial India has been synonymous with catastrophe and crisis. Focusing on the literary works of the 1943 Bengal Famine, the 1967–72 Naxalbari Movement, and the 1975–77 Indian Emergency, it shows that there is a long-term, colonially-engineered agrarian crisis enabling these catastrophic events. Novelists such as Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Nabarun Bhattacharya, and Nayantara Sahgal, among others, have captured the relationship between the long-term crisis and the catastrophic aspects of the events through different aesthetic modalities within realism, ranging from analytical-affective, critical realist, quest modes to apparently non-realist ones such as metafictional, urban fantastic, magical realist, and others. These realist modalities are together read here as postcolonial catastrophic realism.
Download or read book Politics of the Possible written by Kumkum Sangari and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A refreshing and wide-ranging approach to the study of South Asian politics.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel written by Ato Quayson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape.
Download or read book Realism Form and Representation in the Edwardian Novel written by Charlotte Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real represents to my perception the things that we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another', wrote Henry James in 1907. This description, riven with double negatives, hesitation, and uncertainty, encapsulates the epistemological difficulties of realism, for underlying its narrative and descriptive apparatus as an aesthetic mode lies a philosophical quandary. What grounds the 'real' of the realist novel? What kind of perception is required to validate the experience of reality? How does the realist novel represent the difficulty of knowing? What comes to the fore in James's account, as in so many, is how the forms of realism are constituted by a relation to unknowing, absence, and ineffability. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel recovers a neglected literary history centred on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and philosophical commitment. It asks how—or if—we can conceptualize realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and are thus irreducible to conceptual schemes or linguistic practices—a formulation Charlotte Jones refers to as 'synthetic realism'. In new readings of Edwardian novels including Conrad's Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Wells's Tono-Bungay, and Ford's The Good Soldier, this volume revises and reconsiders key elements of realist novel theory—metaphor and metonymy; character interiority; the insignificant detail; omniscient narration and free indirect discourse; causal linearity—to uncover the representational strategies by which realist writers grapple with the recalcitrance of reality as a referential anchor, and seek to give form to the force, opacity, and uncertain scope of realities that may lie beyond the material. In restoring a metaphysical dimension to the realist novel's imaginary, Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel offers a new conceptualization of realism both within early twentieth-century literary culture and as a transhistorical mode of representation.
Download or read book Postcolonial Poetics written by Patrick Crowley and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to calls to focus on postcolonial literature's literary qualities instead of merely its political content, this volume investigates the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics. However, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, the essays collected here analyze how texts use genre and form to offer multiple and distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. By probing how different kinds of literary writing can blur with other discourses, the contributors offer key insights into postcolonial literature's power to imagine alternative identities and societies.
Download or read book Magical Realism written by Lois Parkinson Zamora and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On magical realism in literature
Download or read book Postcolonial Satire written by Amy L. Friedman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Uncertain Mirrors written by Jesús Benito Sánchez and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno's concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term "mimesis" as both a "world-reflecting" and a "world-creating" mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different "location of culture" and "direction of culture;" they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.
Download or read book Untouchable Fictions Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste written by Toral Jatin Gajarawala and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 writings 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?
Download or read book Postcolonialism A Guide for the Perplexed written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonialism as a critical approach and pedagogic practice has informed literary and cultural studies since the late 1980s. The term is heavily loaded and has come to mean a wide, and often bewildering, variety of approaches, methods, politics and ideas. Beginning with the historical origins of postcolonial thought in the writings of Gandhi, Cesaire and Fanon, this guide moves on to Edward Said's articulation into a critical approach and finally to postcolonialism's multiple forms in contemporary critical thinking, including theorists such as Bhabha, Spivak, Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmed. Written in jargon-free language and illustrated with examples from literary and cultural texts, this book addresses the many concerns, forms and 'specializations' of postcolonialism, including gender and sexuality studies, the nations and nationalism, space and place, history and politics. It explains the key ideas, concepts and approaches in what is arguably the most influential and politically edged critical approach in literary and cultural theory today
