@article{1477556,
      recid = {1477556},
      author = {Gajarawala, Toral Jatin, },
      title = {Untouchable Fictions : Literary Realism and the Crisis of  Caste /},
      pages = {1 online resource (272 p.)},
      abstract = {Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary  realism- progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental- in  order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent  explosion of Dalit ("untouchable" caste) fiction. Drawing  on a wide array of fiction from Premchand and Renu in Hindi  to Mulk Raj Anand and V.S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala  illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden  aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the  novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic  constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions  juxtaposes the Dalit text, and its radical critique, with a  history of progressive literary movements in South Asia.  Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice  to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions  while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment  in the literary genealogy of the 20th and 21st century. How  might we trace the origins of the rise of Dalit fiction in  the critical "realism" of the Progressive Writers  Association of the 1930s, or in the gaps laid bare by the  peasant novel of the 1950s? And what kind of dialogue does  "untouchable caste" writing with its more famous  counterpart: the Anglophone fiction of the last few  decades? Under Gajarawala's lens the aesthetic languages of  Hindi and English are intertwined and caste becomes a  central category of literary analysis. This book, grounded  in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian  literatures, and cultural studies will be important for all  readers interested in the problematic relations between  aesthetics and politics, between social movements and  cultural production. Engaged as it is with contemporary  theories of realism and the problem of aesthetics, it would  also be of interest to students of English, comparative  literature, contemporary Third World literature, and  historians of literary movements. More specifically, as a  text that considers recent developments in genre theory and  South Asian fiction, it would interest scholars of the  Indian and Indian Anglophone novel. Finally, this project,  as an interrogation of caste politics in the cultural  sphere, is an important contribution to the burgeoning  field of Dalit studies.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1477556},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823245277},
}