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Zusatztext How did the multilingual literary landscape of nineteenth-century Bengal shape the Bengali novel? Bhattacharya tells the story of the Bengali novel not through the English language experiments of its most famous practitioners like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Instead, her book explores the reading strategies of the earliest readers, who drew on their familiarity with Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, and Arabic traditions to read Chattopadhyay and Hossain’s Bengali novels. A fascinating account of how readers are made and how unfamiliar literary genres are read. Informationen zum Autor Sunayani Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California, USA. Her research areas include postcolonial studies, world literature, and novel studies. She has published her work in the Comparative Literature journal and in several edited volumes. Klappentext 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. Vorwort Examines a history of reading practices in 19th-century Bengal at the intersection of Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic aesthetics, British colonial pedagogy, and the rise of Bengali novels. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Introduction: Establishing the Problem — Reading as a Practice1. Breaking the Cycle of Bad Readers: Battala Literature, Colonial Pedagogy, and the Idea of Education 2. Becoming a Reader: Letters, Reviews, and Memories of Reading3. Dear Reader, Good Sir: The Reader and Bankim’s Novels4. Another World of Reading: Hossain and Islamic Bengali ProseConclusion: The Novelty of Reading Bibliography Index ...
