Description
Book SynopsisShifting the postcolonial focus away from the city and towards the village, this book examines the rural as a trope in twentieth-century South Asian literatures to propose a new literary history based on notions of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia and how these ideas have circulated in the literary and the cultural imaginaries of the subcontinent.
Trade Review“Anupama Mohan has written a lively book with a focus on the utopian imaginative mode and the representation of the village in South Asian literatures … . Mohan’s book is thus a promising beginning: it is an entrée to a potentially highly fertile field, and whets one’s appetite for more work, for more academic conversations and collaborations between scholars working on utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia in South Asian literatures.” (Barnita Bagchi, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 52 (4), 2015)
“Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures is an excellent exploration of the function of the utopic in the representation of the rural in the work of Indian and Sri Lankan writers. … Anupama Mohan’s Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures is a very important contribution not only to South Asian literary studies and utopia studies but to scholars of spatial modernity as well, particularly in the postcolonial context.” (Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, South Asian Review, Vol. 36 (1), 2015)
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Representing the Rural Hind Swaraj and Rural Utopia Beddagama: Dystopia in Ceylon Kanthapura and Khasak: Utopia in Distress Koggala and the Reclaimed Buddhist Utopia Rethinking the Binary: Rural Heterotopia Conclusion Works Cited Index
