This volume offers a selection of critical essays on texts that can be broadly categorized as popular literature. The essays are inclined to question the idea of 'the Canon' and re-consider the divide between the canonical and the popular. As such, besides engaging in a serious critical reading of typical popular literary texts like "The Jungle Book" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles", the book also considers populist tendencies in literary classics like "Jane Eyre" and "Frankenstein". It will be of interest to young scholars and readers of popular literature, science fiction, detective fiction, genre studies, and culture studies. The volume's contributors are: Anisha Ghosh, Arnab Dasgupta, Goutam Karmakar, Jaya Sarkar, Jaydip Sarkar, Madhuparna Mitra Guha, Mandika Sinha, Mitarik Barma, Pinaki Roy, Puja Chakraborty, Rajadipta Roy, Rupayan Mukherjee, Shirsendu Mandal, Shubham Dey.
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section I Juvenile Literature
- The Proper and the Pure: Biopolitics, Law and Sujectivity in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book
- Making the Chessboard Smooth: Popular as “Nonsense” in Through the Looking Glass
- Narrative Function and Identity in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist
- Section II Science Fiction
- Hail the Monster and Fie the Man: The Construction of Monstrosity in Frankenstein
- Rethinking Sciences, Situations and Bamboo-groves in Ray’s Science Fictions: Guessing Who Speaks What
- Utopia as Dystopia: Subjectivity at the Limits of Subjection in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
- Section III Crime and Detective Fiction
- Reclaiming the Elementaries of Context: Ponderings on Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles
- “Our mysterious neighbour, Mr. Poirot”: Locating the ‘Other’ Detective in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- “What Shall I see in my dreams tonight?”: Reading the Repressed in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
- Section IV Romance
- Trauma as Calamity or Capital?: The Aporia of Representation and the Ethics of Reading in Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl
- Phantasmagoria of the Hegemonic Cultural Structure: Interrogating the Indian Urban Facade in Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend
- Relocating the Classic as Popular: Reading Jane Eyre as a Romance
- Post Script
- Why my Children Love Cinderella and I Don’t: Negotiations with a Classic-Popular Fairy Tale
- About the Contributors