Modernist Transitions

Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s

Subhadeep Ray, Goutam Karmakar, Subhadeep Ray, Goutam Karmakar

• Publisher: Bloomsbury India
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9789356404366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century. The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, but conditioned in many ways by common socio-historical catastrophes and promises, interact with each other to constitute an 'aesthetics of motion and dissonance'. Essays cut across literary criticism to employ interdisciplinary approaches, as they blur the boundaries between histories, biographies and fictional narratives, between individual ethics in and outside the fictional world, between imagined and living communities, between real and generic politics, between the home and the world, and between the corporeal and the cultural. These essays interrogate the mastery in literary techniques, narrative motives and dualities, 'major' and 'minor' genres, (de)formations of canons in respect of the 'worldliness' formed by the textual incorporation of the intricate imperial relationships between the United Kingdom and Bangla.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: TRANSITIONING TO AND FROM MODERNISM by Pramod K. Nayar
• Introduction: SCOPES AND LIMITS OF MODERNIST TRANSITIONS IN THE BRITISH–BANGLA CONTEXT by Subhadeep Ray and Goutam Karmakar
• PART I: SETTING THE PARADIGMS: NATIONS AND NARRATIONS Editors’ Introduction
• PART II: ‘EVERYTHING IS THE PROPER STUFF OF FICTION’: INTERSECTIONS OF MODERNISM AND REALISM IN NARRATIVES OF CORPOREALITY, SUBJECTIVITY, ALIENATION AND WAR Editors’ Introduction
• PART III INTERPLAY BETWEEN TRADITIONS AND GENRES OF MODERNIST AND LATE-MODERNIST FICTION Editors’ Introduction
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index