From Leda e il Cigno to Masala Coke, or from the English Novel in India to the Indian Novel Written in English around the World

  • Rossella Ciocca University of the Studies of Naples “l’Orientale”
Keywords: Novel, Anglophone, Indian, Diasporic, Post-colonial, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai

Abstract

Indian culture is playing an increasingly imposing role in shaping new scenarios of globalization. This article attempts to highlight the contribution offered to the international literary scene by the multifarious variegated corpus of fiction represented by the Anglophone Indian novel, both in its domestic and diasporic dimensions. In recent years, writers from the Indian subcontinent have achieved a global readership and a prominent translational status. This is manifest for instance in their repeated appearances on shortlists for international book prizes. This study aims to trace, in the peculiar hybrid quality of the Indian novel in English, some recurrent trends which are, nonetheless, discernible. Its emergence from the colonial encounter and the subsequent birth of nationalist feelings and awareness have marked for example its dominant preoccupation with both history and nation and these come together to shape its ineluctably post-colonial character. The concern with place/displacement, with identity and belonging, and above all with the question of language, cannot but be topical to the literature of a country which has seen the rise of the genre in coincidence with the fundamental experiences of foreign domination, the conquest of independence, and mass migration.

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Author Biography

Rossella Ciocca, University of the Studies of Naples “l’Orientale”
Rossella Ciocca is Professor of English Literature at the University of the Studies of Naples “l’Orientale”. She has worked on early modern literature and culture; Shakespeare; modernism; postmodernism; literary and critical theory; colonial and post-colonial history and literature. Her recent research interests lie in the area of the contemporary Indian novel in English. Her publications include volumes on Shakespeare (Il cerchio d’oro. I re sacri nel teatro shakespeariano; 1987; La musica dei sensi. Amore e pulsione nello Shakespeare comico-romantico; 1999) and a study on the literary representations of otherness from the early modern to pre-modernist periods (I volti dell’altro. Saggio sulla diversità; 1990). Her recent works include essays on contemporary Anglophone writers. She has edited a volume of “Anglistica”; titled Indiascapes: Images and Words from Globalised India (2008).

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Published
2011-11-25
How to Cite
Ciocca, R. (2011). From <i>Leda e il Cigno</i&gt; to Masala Coke, or from the English Novel in India to the Indian Novel Written in English around the World. Between, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/299