Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers an account of how the modern idea of the literary emerged, through the colonial archives. Situated at the cusp of postcolonialism and world literature, it offers a multilingual, multicultural, and comparative account of how literature became one of the most powerful cultural expressions of modernity.
Trade Review'In this magisterial book, Baidik Bhattacharya develops a surprising thesis: that the modern conception of literature as an autonomous, self-directed cultural form was the product of a highly political process – the efforts of colonial British administrators to extend their sway in India and beyond. This is a compelling, revisionary genealogy of the contemporary idea of culture, and a major contribution to debates on the intertwined origins of world literature and modern empire.' David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
'Baidik Bhattacharya's erudition in the fields of Indian and British literary history and his transdisciplinary approach to 'lettered sovereignty' as a catalyst of colonial modernity give us a fresh perspective on what Pascale Casanova famously dubbed the 'world republic of letters.' Philological legacies; questions of race, language, and translation; the formation and deformation of epistemic habits crucial to narratives of empire; comparatism in the colony (including the complex reception of European philosophies of aesthetic judgment and nationalist imagination within Indian education) – all receive fine-grained analysis, making Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters essential reading for scholars, critics, historians, and theorists committed to rethinking the postcolonial public sphere in the contemporary humanities.' Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University, and author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
Table of ContentsPreface and acknowledgement; Introduction: formations of the literary sovereign; Part I. Epistemic Habits: 1. Ethnographic recension; 2. Colonial untranslatables; 3. Comparatism in the colony; Part II. Aesthetic Conventions: 4. Impure aesthetics; 5. Sanskrit on shagreen; 6. National enframing; Coda: Decolonization after world literature; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
