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Author Banerjee, Sandeep, author

Title Space, utopia and Indian decolonization : literary pre-figurations of the postcolony / Sandeep Banerjee
Published London ; New York : Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2019
©2019

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Description 1 online resource
Series Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian studies series
Contents Cover; Half Title; Series; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgements; Note on the use of Bengali, Hindi, and Sanskrit; List of figures; Introduction: spatial desire in the age of empire; 1 Of good and evil: the anxiety of utopianism; 2 Tales of a city: writing colonial Calcutta; 3 That magnificent song: between the performative and the pedagogic; 4 A sense of place: narrating knowable communities; Epilogue: that im/possible spatial desire called decolonization; Appendix: Jana Gana Mana by Rabindranath Tagore; Bibliography; Index
Summary The book illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [157]-171) and index
Notes Description based on print version record
Subject South Asian literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc
Space and time in literature.
Colonies in literature.
Nationalism in literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Asian -- General.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Ethnic Studies -- Asian American Studies.
Colonies in literature
Nationalism in literature
Space and time in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2019717493
ISBN 9781138393684
1138393681
9780429401626
0429401620
9780429686399
0429686390
9780429686405
0429686404
9780429686382
0429686382