Myths of The Nation
National Identity and Literary Representation
Price: 425.00 INR
ISBN:
9780195681154
Publication date:
19/06/2006
Hardback
Price: 425.00 INR
ISBN:
9780195681154
Publication date:
19/06/2006
Hardback
Rumina Sethi
Suitable for: This book will be of interest to scholars and students of South Asian postcolonial literature, theory, and culture, and an informed general reading audience
Rights: SOUTH ASIA RIGHTS (RESTRICTED)
Rumina Sethi
Description
The author traces nationalism from its abstract underpinnings to its concrete manifestation in historical fiction, which underwrites the Indian freedom struggle. The construction of identity through mythicized conceptions of India is examined in detail through Raja Rao's first novel, Kanthapura. Written in the late 1930s at a time when nationalist ideology gained ground rapidly, the novel is also an ideal example of literary history which is very close to the history of the freedom movement in India under Gandhi's tutelage. The author shows how orientalists, nationalists, Marxists, subalternists, and poststructuralists, have, in their own celebratory ways, used the disenfranchized sub-proletariat in their works. What she finds useful, however, is that subaltern identities are imbued with heterogeneity, thus splitting open an authoritarian and reactionary nationalism, and a continuing neo-colonialism. Over the years, there exists a contradiction between the more pronounced use of the native language and the continued dependence on Western theory. In today's context, the nation interacts with the forces of globalization to reach a postnational thinking into previously uncharted territory especially with the onslaught of capitalism on nations of the South issuing from the ‘imperialist' project of the United States
Rumina Sethi
Rumina Sethi
Description
The author traces nationalism from its abstract underpinnings to its concrete manifestation in historical fiction, which underwrites the Indian freedom struggle. The construction of identity through mythicized conceptions of India is examined in detail through Raja Rao's first novel, Kanthapura. Written in the late 1930s at a time when nationalist ideology gained ground rapidly, the novel is also an ideal example of literary history which is very close to the history of the freedom movement in India under Gandhi's tutelage. The author shows how orientalists, nationalists, Marxists, subalternists, and poststructuralists, have, in their own celebratory ways, used the disenfranchized sub-proletariat in their works. What she finds useful, however, is that subaltern identities are imbued with heterogeneity, thus splitting open an authoritarian and reactionary nationalism, and a continuing neo-colonialism. Over the years, there exists a contradiction between the more pronounced use of the native language and the continued dependence on Western theory. In today's context, the nation interacts with the forces of globalization to reach a postnational thinking into previously uncharted territory especially with the onslaught of capitalism on nations of the South issuing from the ‘imperialist' project of the United States
Read MoreA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain
A Day in the Country and other Stories
Guy De Maupassant & David Coward
A Tale of Tub & Oth Works Reissue
David Woolley & Jonathan Swift
Memoirs From the House of the Dead Reissue
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories
A. S. Byatt
The Oxford Shakespeare-King Henry VIII Or All is True
William Shakespeare