Description
Book SynopsisThe contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.
Trade ReviewA diverse and interesting set of studies ranging widely over the period by a prominent group of experts in the field. -- Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford
Table of ContentsIntroduction, by Shafquat Towheed 1. Colonialism, Slavery, and Religion on Stage: Late Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, the Hastings Trial, and the Making of British India, by Marianna D'Ezio 2. India as Gothic Horror: Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Images of Juggernaut in Early Nineteenth-Century Missionary Writing, by Andrew Rudd 3. Intrepid Traveller, "She-Merchant," or Colonialist Historiographer: Reading Eliza Fay's Original Letters, by Nira Gupta-Casale 4. The British Woman Traveller in India: Cultural Intimacy and Interracial Kinship in Fanny Parks's Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, by Nandini Sengupta 5. Inconsequential Lives: The Voyage Out and Anglo-Indian Fictions of Voyaging and Domesticity, by Pia Mukherji 6. Remade Womanhoods, Refashioned Modernities: The Construction of "Good Womanhood" in Annisa, an Early Twentieth-Century Women's Magazine in Urdu, by Rekha Pande, K. C. Bindu, Viqar Atiya 7. Abu'l A'la Mawdudi: British India and the Politics of Popular Islamic Texts, by Masood Ashraf Raja 8. Memoirs of Maharanis: The Politics of Marriage, Companionship, and Love in Late-Colonial Princely India, by Angma Dey Jhala 9. The Reception of Marie Corelli in India, by Prodosh Bhattacharya 10. "The Sahib try to kiss me": The Construction of the Queer Subaltern in J. R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday, by Shafquat Towheed 11. Cultural Contestations in the Literary Marketplace: Reading Raja Rao's Kanthapura and Aubrey Menen's The Prevalence of Witches, by Ruvani Ranasinha 12. Casualty of War, Casualty of Empire: Mulk Raj Anand in England, by Kristin Bluemel Contributors
