Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism

Modernism in a Global Context (introduction)

Exploring the transnational dimension of literary modernism and its increasing centrality to our understanding of 20th-century literary culture, Modernism in a Global Context surveys the key issues and debates central to the 'global turn' in contemporary Modernist Studies. Topics covered include: - Transnational literary exchange - Imperialism and Modernism - Cosmopolitanism and postcolonial literatures - Global literary institutions - from the Little Magazine to the Nobel Prize - Mass media - photography, cinema, and radio broadcasting in the modernist age See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/modernism-in-a-global-context-9781472569639/#sthash.ZA3EsC8K.dpu

Cities of affluence and anger: Urbanism and social class in twentieth century British literature.

This dissertation uses literary theory, cultural studies, and human geography to show how social space informs our understanding of narrative form in order to argue that narrative must occupy a place as well as plot a story. By reading urban fiction from the last century, it demonstrates that the modern spatial reorganization of Britain's cities has changed the social meanings attached to narrative. It argues there is a strong connection between literary form and urban geography. Cities provide more than a setting; they participate in the creation of narrative structure. The first chapter studies Howards End and Brideshead Revisited to explore the diminishing role of pastoral literature in the twentieth century. The simple stories in these novels conceal a sophisticated, metafictional plotting device: by narrating the demise of landed families, these texts also historicize the declining significance of the country-house novel in contemporary literature. The following two chapters analyze domestic fiction to explain the textual representation of urban change. The second chapter argues that the novels of the Angry Young Men in the 1950s refashion the domestic narrative as a way to articulate a hyperbolically masculine, working class political consciousness. This style of working class masculinity was enabled by the material geography of postwar urbanism. Chapter three uses The Golden Notebook to interrogate British domesticity from a postcolonial perspective. In response to Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing writes the metropole as the locus of madness, subjecting the colonial center to the scrutiny it once reserved for the periphery. Lessing deploys her intimate knowledge of British social life to satirize and undermine the trope of domesticity in order to destabilize our understanding of colonialism. This dissertation concludes with a reading of The Satanic Verses and postcolonial literature in England. It proposes the term metropolitan postcolonialism to examine how postcolonial immigration has adapted and transformed metropolitan urban space and narrative techniques. This dissertation reconsiders the role of urbanism in the creation of modern fictional form. It argues urban space gives British and postcolonial narratives a cultural and structural language through which they can dramatize the conditions of modern social life.Ph.D.African literatureAsian literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127822/2/3029356.pd