In Another Country - Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India

In a work of stunning archival recovery and interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi illuminates the cultural work performed by two kinds of English novels in India during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers and writers, empire and nation, consumption and production, In Another Country vividly explores a process by which first readers and then writers of the English novel indigenized the once imperial form and put it to their own uses. Asking what nineteenth-century Indian readers chose to read and why, Joshi shows how these readers transformed the literary and cultural influences of empire. By subsequently analyzing the eventual rise of the English novel in India, she further demonstrates how Indian novelists, from Krupa Satthianadhan to Salman Rushdie, took an alien form in an alien language and used it to address local needs. Taken together in this manner, reading and writing reveal the complex ways in which culture is continually translated and transformed in a colonial and postcolonial context.

List of contents

Part I: Consuming Fiction
1. The Poetical Economy of Consumption
2. The Circulation of Fiction in Indian Libraries, ca. 1835--1901
3. Readers Write Back: The Macmillan Colonial Library in India
Part II: Producing Fiction
4. By Way of Transition: Bankim's Will, or Indigenizing the Novel in India
5. Reforming the Novel: Krupa Satthianadhan, the Woman who Did
6. The Exile at Home: Ahmed Ali's "Twilight in Delhi"
7. The Other Modernism, or The Family Romance in English

About the author

Priya Joshi

Summary

Priya Joshi demonstrates how a paradoxical legacy has shaped the works of Indian writers such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Ahmed Ali and Salman Rushdie, a process she calls the "indigenization" of the English novel.

Product details

• Authors: Priya Joshi, Joshi Priya
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 24.04.2002
• EAN: 9780231125857
• ISBN: 978-0-231-12585-7
• No. of pages: 368
• Subjects: Fiction; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; English, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Indic, India, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Language: reference & general, Colonialism and imperialism, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, National liberation and independence, HISTORY / Asia / South / General