Imagining a postcolonial nation : Hindi novels and forms of India (1940s-80s) /
This book explores narratives of nationalism in the Hindi novel (1940s–80s), engaging with mainstream, populist, political conceptualization of a postcolonial nation and local, cultural, often marginalized fictional parallels and alternatives to it. Analyzing processes of nation-formation and nation...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New Delhi ; New York :
Bloomsbury Publishing,
2023.
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| Summary: | This book explores narratives of nationalism in the Hindi novel (1940s–80s), engaging with mainstream, populist, political conceptualization of a postcolonial nation and local, cultural, often marginalized fictional parallels and alternatives to it. Analyzing processes of nation-formation and nationalism(s) via experiments with the novel form and versions of realism in Hindi, conversations between the political and the cultural, rural/borders and the urban/central spaces, individual subjectivity and social structures and the challenges Hindi novels' internal linguistic diversity poses to formalized Hindi's hegemony, Imagining a Postcolonial Nation: Hindi Novels and Forms of India (1940s–80s) traces Hindi fiction's history of postcolonial India. The multiplicity of realisms indicates significant responses to postcolonial nationalism, idealistic, critical, regional, satirical and psychological. Looking at indigenous narrative methods employed by authors to critically evolve Western ideas of the nation and novel, the book explores the simultaneous convergences and divergences between literary and political understandings of ideological, religious and linguistic nationalisms. Surveying the broad sentiments of idealism, enchantment and disenchantment with freedom and postcoloniality, it studies the possibilities of fiction embodying national history without an outright commitment to mainstream nationalism or nationalist literary canon formation. It also briefly tries to understand the repercussions of nationalism as a masculinist project and its gendered nature affecting a section of writing, novels by women authors, to present counter-narratives to both national and literary canons. Choosing a fairly broad historical timeframe, the book reveals the radical potential of narratives that have over the years been critically categorized as canonical. It reopens discussions around nationalism within novels that have been often canonized as apparently uncritically nationalist. |
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| Physical Description: | ix, 273 pages ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9789356400238 9356400237 |