Emerging Territories: A Study in New Literatures in English

Contents: Acknowledgments. Preface. 1. Emerging territories in English literatures. 2. Africa: He is not here!: A look at the last(ing) chapter of things fall apart. 3. Caribbean: wide Sargasso Sea: recovery of a lost story of the ‘other’ woman. 4. Australia: On “The Fatal Shore’ of the Penal colony: Jack Maggs as Australia’s Wide Sargasso Sea. 5. New Zealand: “The Garden Party’ from ‘the other side of the doorway’: Witi Ihimaera ‘Writing Back’ to ‘Dear Mrs Beauchamp’. 6. Canada: ‘Nation building’ and the ‘invisible’ woman: an Indo-Canadian perspective. 7. Canada: the ‘Great Resonances’: Kroetsch’s use of Myths in What the Crow said. 8. Canada: Atwood’s ‘Muse’: in the (grand)mother’s mirror. 9. Canada: Margaret Atwood’s ‘Nightingale”: a re-creation of the Philomel myth. 10. Diaspora: V.S. Naipaul: ‘An Indian who is not an Indian’. 11. India: the new generation: Amitav Ghosh: interrogating the multi-layered ‘lines’ in The Shadow Lines. 12. India: the new generation: Vikram Seth: Writing a Novel with a tree, a Raag, and a river. 13. India: the new generation: Niranjan Mohanty: Krishna: a study in the ‘Fusion of Myths’. 14. India: Women writers: for a space of ‘Her’ own: Fire on the Mountain. 15. India: women writers: redefining the margin: The God of small Things. 16. India: women writers: Musicalizing fiction : metafiction and intermediality in small remedies. 17. Postface: ‘In search of my mother’s garden’. Bibliography. Index.

“Just as British literature today has been undergoing radical shifts within its own parameters much more radical changes are taking place in the area of non-British literatures across the world in various cultural historical contexts. New literature in English has been too vast an area to be homogenized and reduced to a unitary definition. All the major segments have come up-Indian, African, Caribbean, New Zealand, as well as the literature of settler communities of Canada or Australia or South Africa-each with its own unique distinctive features.

Furthermore, postcolonial writing, which had started with search for roots and identity as its initial drive has not stopped there, but has also expanded in multifarious directions in the recent decades, and today it has reached a stage where, in the hands of avant-garde writers, it seems to have embraced postmodernism and reached beyond.

Since English literature offers the widest platform for cultural interaction of the world today, it should be the special prerogative of practitioners, readers and scholars of English literature/s over the world today to watch and follow this emerging process of ‘cultural cross-pollination’, its mystique and wonder, as the huge flow of English literature changes course along an unprecedented turn of man’s cultural history with the aspiration to ‘overlap territories’ and ‘intertwine histories’.

This is perhaps the newest trend, the most recently emerging territory which will be the end-result of ‘overlapping territories’ and ‘intertwining histories’, and, let us hope, will usher in a better future.

The present volume offers in its seventeen chapters selective studies on contemporary texts representing some of the various facets/dimensions/layers of the many emerging ‘territories’ in English literatures today in addition to an illuminating ‘introduction’ and thought-provoking ‘postface’.”