Hillion, Marianne (2021) Between the epic and the ordinary : locating the politics of contemporary Indian urban writing in English (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata). PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Preview

PDF WRAP_Theses_Hillion_2021.pdf - Submitted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (4Mb) | Preview

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

While the city has been central to the Indian novel in English since the 1980s, the profusion of urban novels, essays and literary reportages published since the 2000s has triggered a formal and thematic renewal of the literary discourse on the Indian city. At the crossroads of literature and urban studies, this thesis locates this literary phenomenon in the context of India’s embrace of global capitalism in the 1990s, which has resulted in the accelerated expansion and transformation of Indian cities, inspired by the model of the global city. Based on a corpus of fictional and non-fictional texts on Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, I study the development of a critical urban imaginary which expresses the contradictory experience of this urban metamorphosis through the interplay between two major aesthetic modes, and challenges both orientalist and nationalist discourses on the Indian city. These texts oscillate between an epic mode, which defamiliarize urban modernisation and amplifies the collision between antagonistic global social forces in the city, and an ordinary mode, which explores this historical process at the scale of the locality through the lens of everyday life, obliquely shedding light on structural violence but also on tactics devised by urban outcasts to reclaim urban space. These two modes are considered as the two faces of a critical literary approach of the city, which rests on the strong historical consciousness of the writers. Their works unveil the multiple layers of a fragmented urban history which contemporary urban planning endeavours to erase.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races P Language and Literature > PK Indo-Iranian P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Cities and towns -- India, India -- In literature, Indic literature -- History and criticism, Cities and towns in literature, City planning -- India
Official Date:	22 October 2021
Dates:	Date Event 22 October 2021 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo ; Tadié, M. Alexis
Sponsors:	University of Warwick. Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies ; Sorbonne Université. École Doctorale IV (Ed 020). Laboratoire De Recherche Vale (EA 4085)
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	489 leaves
Language:	eng

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads