Global Literatures and Cultures of Modernity

Global Literatures and Cultures of Modernity: Critical Perspectives from India brings together essays written by academicians and scholars from India to scrutinize how global modernities have been shaped since World War II, from the Indian perspective.

It examines literary musings of Anglophone writers hailing from various parts of the globe whose diverse voices present compelling narratives on modernity vis-à-vis the human condition. This volume brings together critical essays on writers such as Girish Karnad, Anita Desai, Anita Nair, and Jean Arasanayagam to examine the South Asian experience; by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Naguib Mahfouz to explore the African and Arabic world order; by Jane Harrison and Wesley Enoch to address the Australian aboriginal condition; by William Golding, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Sarah Kane to scrutinize British cultural politics; by Jamaica Kincaid and Elizabeth Acevedo to highlight Latin American and Caribbean modernity, and last but not the least, by John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, and Mary Gordon to analyze North American politico-religious experiences of modernity. The diverse themes in this book therefore touch upon historical trauma, religious revisioning, masculinity, feminist debates, gender studies, ethnic discrimination and diversity, and caste and class politics, among many others.

The book’s varied themes are united by the fact that they all converse with global and transnational dynamics shaped by postwar modernity that today defines our world. The book crafts narratives on contemporary global literatures and the modern conditions they represent and does so from the vantage point of postmillennial Indian literary scholarship.