Volume 58, Issue 2

The paper explores the centrality of crime fiction to the formation of colonial authority, focussing on an aspect which up to now has received little attention: the confessional narrative. Using Philip Meadows Taylor’s imperial bestseller Confessions of a Thug (1839) as an example, the paper scrutinizes how the confessional narrative is used for legitimising British rule in India. By examining the formal peculiarities of the confessional mode it becomes evident that the confession is furnished with an ambivalent dimension that may not only disrupt the law and order inherent in the genre of crime fiction but that also poses a challenge to the reader and invites considerations on a larger cultural scale. Stories of order and disorder interrogate imperial authority even as they play a key role in its entrenchment

Debates on Ishmael Reed’s neo-slave narrative Flight to Canada (1979) and its rewriting of African American identity and history can benefit from an in-depth comparative analysis focused on the writer’s reconfiguration of two significant nineteenthcentury figures - the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and philosophical views as well as on African American studies, this paper discusses the way in which Reed’s novel de/re-constructs the images of the black pacifist and the rebellious mulatto, in close intertextual connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853). If nineteenthcentury authors insisted on self-made models of manhood, Reed’s postmodern writing proposes fiction-made characters, parasitically feeding on earlier texts. In true postmodern fashion, Reed’s heroes refuse to be labeled as either “real” or “imaginary,” to wear only nineteenth-century costumes, and to be pinned down to a certain temporal or spatial dimension. By rewriting the nineteenth-century texts, Reed exposes the conventional versions of black identity that transform “black history into mythic fiction,” warning us that we should be equally afraid of romanticized or demonized representations of the African American character (Campbell 1986, xi)

Some critics have argued that the commonality between Frost’s poetic philosophy and Taoism lies in “a quest for a thorough freedom,” namely, freeing oneself from the bonds of nature, society and the self. While there is validity in such a view, their interpretation seems a bit too reductive in the sense that too much emphasis is given to the tendency, in both Frost’s and Taoist philosophy, to Chu Shi (to renounce the world), while this tendency is subtly balanced by a willingness to Ru Shi (to accept the world). The present paper, therefore, seeks to examine the way in which Robert Frost bears affinities to Taoism in the aspect of Ru Shi as well as that of Chu Shi. “West-Running Brook,” with its central image of the brook which is at once water and road, offers itself as a good point of entry into the similarities between the themes of Frost and such philosophical ideas as proposed by either Lao Tzu or Zhuang Tzu, and makes us realize Frost’s balanced philosophical attitudes toward life

The present article is an attempt to reassess English novelist Margaret Drabble in relation to women’s issues. She has usually been termed as a writer who presents an ambiguous stance towards feminism and this view has been heavily influenced by her characterization as a moral writer. However a richer and more complex view of her writing can be achieved by paying attention to her career as a whole and to a tenuous sensuousness which now and then appears in her work. The starting point is a letter to Margaret Drabble written by Saul Bellow which has never been published and in which the American novelist complains about his portrayal as a failed seducer in Drabble’s short piece “A Success Story” (1972). The disclosing of this previously unknown letter also provides the opportunity for new insights into the publishing milieu in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s

While the extensive criticism on Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker (which upon its publication immediately became the most successful Korean American novel of all time) has not failed to assess the novel’s negotiation of issues of ethnicity and identity, as well as of the possibilities and pitfalls of political enfranchisement, it has generally concluded that in the last analysis, Native Speaker despairs of the possibility of political change. By paying attention to the (ostensibly apolitical) question of how the novel deals with strategies for coping with personal loss, with histories of dispossession, and with social injuries, this essay argues that the political significance of the novel lies in its dismissal of a melancholic conception of political agency and its concomitant recognition of the need to develop adequately explanatory social narratives for coming to terms with experiences of loss (a process that is related to Freud’s notion of mourning). As such, the novel undertakes a wide-ranging critique of the recuperation of melancholia as an adequate ethico-political posture in critical theory in the last quarter century

Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass (1995) is a remarkable piece of historiographical metafiction that imaginatively reconstructs the final years of India’s national movement. For this reason, it provides us with rich material to explore the relationship between the postcolonial narrative of the Indian nation and the anticolonial energies of the independence movement. But more importantly, as the present article argues, Kesavan’s novel locates in the national movement’s inability to resist the communal interpolation of its politics the genesis of contemporary India’s “embattled secularism,” particularly after the sudden rise into prominence in the 1980s and ‘90s of a right wing Hindu nationalist political party. How does this narrative deconstruct the ‘nationalist’ projections of this movement as a revolutionary spectacle? Why and how does this narrative seek to undermine the language of high theatre usually used in ‘nationalist’ accounts of this movement? These are some of the other questions which my article seeks to critically engage with.