The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of realism
During the second half of the nineteenth century, people
across India began to write books they called “novels,” sometimes using traditional
terms for ‘story’ or ‘prose narrative’ in their respective language, sometimes
simply using the English term “novel.” Only recently critics have acknowledged that
this ‘emergence of the novel’ in India was not simply the importation of a Western
form or a borrowed genre, but rather a set of complex sociocultural processes that
varied significantly from one linguistic region and literary tradition to another.
This chapter examines the question of realism in the early novels written in Indian
languages, i.e., the question of how precisely the earliest Indian novels related to
the societies from which they originated.
Article outline
- 1.Documentary, aesthetic and didactic realism
- 2.Realism and ‘the marvelous’, realism of detail and linguistic realism
- 3.Conclusion
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