Overview

This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century. The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, but conditioned in many ways by common socio-historical catastrophes and promises, interact with each other to constitute an ‘aesthetics of motion and dissonance’. Essays cut across literary criticism to employ interdisciplinary approaches, as they blur the boundaries between histories, biographies and fictional narratives, between individual ethics in and outside the fictional world, between imagined and living communities, between real and generic politics, between the home and the world, and between the corporeal and the cultural. These essays interrogate the mastery in literary techniques, narrative motives and dualities, ‘major’ and ‘minor’ genres, (de)formations of canons in respect of the ‘worldliness’ formed by the textual incorporation of the intricate imperial relationships between the United Kingdom and Bangla.

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Reviews

Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s is a much-awaited book. Bangla has always been known to reflect and even resist Western literary influences through phases of its rich literary tradition. Hence a book that studies one of the major movements in Western literature—that of modernism— and compares both English and Bangla texts with reference to modernist issues and tropes is definitely worth the wait. An area of research that several scholars would have pondered over has finally been given shape by Subhadeep Ray and Goutam Karmakar in this book. A must-read for scholars and students interested in research in both English and Bangla and its comparative studies. -- Professor (Dr) Nandini Saha, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India This innovative collection sheds new light on important questions across a number of disciplinary fields including history, postcolonial and literary studies. It raises new perspectives on modernism, imperialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. -- Dr Esme Cleall, Senior Lecturer on the History of British Empire, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK The histories of Bangla and Britain have long been intertwined—both are key sites in the experience of modernity, industrialisation, empire and its postcolonial consequences. Both, as a consequence, produced in the 20th-century, rich literature that documented and imagined that experience. But there is also an asymmetry—for while English literature is well studied in Bangla, Bangla literature is not studied in Britain to the same extent. This collection of critical essays offers the opportunity to correct this asymmetry, and to consider the literatures of modernity across these two sites not just in comparison, but in complement to one another, opening discussions about nation and narration, intersections between autobiography and fiction, realism, literature and the domestic, and transitions away from colonial and postcolonial tropes. This volume will open up a new world of writing to many readers, and to others, set what they know in a new, and global, perspective. -- Professor Edward Hollis, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Author Information

Subhadeep Ray is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Bidhan Chandra College, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, India, and Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, India. Goutam Karmakar is an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

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