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"Over the past couple of decades, critics and scholars have acknowledged and studied the importance of literary networks outside of North America and Europe that influenced the development of global modernism. This history, however, has been understood through specific dominant, national languages (English, French, Japanese, etc.). Thus, any discussion of Indian modernism has ignored the importance and distinctiveness of literature written in non-English Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi. The Indian writers and dramatists, whose work came to prominence in the middle of the twentieth century were fully cognizant of the movements around the world, but also fully committed to an indigenized aesthetic that drew on classical Indian tradition, realism, and myth. In Cosmo-Modernism, Aparna Dharwadker illuminates how the intensifying cultural and political ferment of anticolonial nationalism and post-independence disenchantment triggered the qualities of rupture, rebellion, and experiment that connect Indian modernisms to transnational modernist formations. The book examines how Indian modernism developed in ways that that demystified the imagined ideal pre-colonial past; merged realism with fantasy, nightmare, and nostalgia to give modernist expression to drives that were submerged under the mundane surface of urban life; and allowed for female collaborative efforts that represented new relations between institutional patronage, authorship, gender, text, and performance, reorienting modernism while retaining its characteristic energies. Rather than viewing non-English works as derivative of modernism or representing a "vernacular" modernism, Dharwadker's book places the periphery at the center."-- Provided by publisher.
About the author
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker is professor of English and interdisciplinary theater studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include
Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947 (2005) and
A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the Present (2019), both of which received the biannual Joe A. Callaway Prize for the best book on theater.
