Description
Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. Fiction As Window by PADMA V
Fiction in India has witnessed great changes since the 1980s. Written, critiqued, read, patronised and translated from the myriad subject positions that Indian culture is teeming with, fiction is a valuable site from which to critique the Indian literary cultural ethos. Fiction as Window, in its first part, uses the fiction produced across languages in India during this vibrant period to critically look at the issues that criticism, patronage and translation of fiction throws up. Cutting across languages, in its second part, the book analyses novels from various Indian languages and those written or translated into English in an attempt to see how these issues are fictionalised. The book cuts new ground with its blend of the literary and the aliterary and its analyses of awards foundations as sites of production of a cultural tradition. The field of literary studies in India since the 1980s has seen a decisive shift towards greater interdisciplinarity. Neither is literature any longer merely a connoisseur’s delight nor is literary criticism any more barely an exercise in aesthetic interpretation. Subversive conceptual changes have made it impossible for literature to remain an isolated creative activity. Literary criticism has perforce to encompass these changes and study their relation to the prevailing forms, themes and techniques in literature today using an integrated methodology. Even as creative literature is fast becoming a discursive space where pressing issues and concerns can be debated and discussed, literary criticism is compelled to turn ideological and is showing an increasing awareness, in a self-reflexive manner, of the paradigms and assumptions that inform its own activity. This study aims at examining the literary cultural ethos in India during this stimulating and perhaps even turbulent period.