Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010

During this book launch at IIAS, the editors Prof. Krishna Sen (Calcutta University) and (former IIAS fellow) Dr. Rituparna Roy will present their book Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010, the latest edited volume in the ICAS Publication Series. After the presentation there will be time to enjoy a drink and talk to the editors.

'Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010'
In this pioneering volume, emerging trends in Indian English fiction in the first decade of the twenty-first century are assessed by leading theorists and scholars such as Bill Ashcroft and practitioners of new genres like Rimi B. Chatterjee, a noted writer of science fiction. India, they assert, is being written anew through a body of work so varied and vibrant that they can no longer be dismissed as derivative or dispossessed, or as mere post colonial “writing back” or compensatory national allegory.

The fifteen essays of this volume debate all these categories afresh in the light of a corpus of writing that ranges from the remapping of mythology and history, the reassessment of globalized India to technical experimentations in the epic, and new genres like science fiction and the graphic novel. Such a corpus amply consolidates the claims of Indian English fiction to be a major component of contemporary Anglophone literature.

ICAS panel
This volume of critical essays is derived from an ICAS panel presentation entitled 'Indian English Fiction: New Themes and Trends 2000-2010', organised and presented by Dr. Rituparna Roy during the joint AAS/ICAS* Conference in Honolulu, Hawai, in 2011.

The organiser's intention had been to make the panel presentation the core of an edited volume. The enthusiastic response from the audience, marked by a lively discussion after the presentations, consolidated this idea. Apart from the original panelists, eminent scholars from across the globe were invited to contribute, and all of them readily agreed, since the proposed volume sought to address issues that are both contemporary and relevant.  

Krishna Sen is Professor and former Head of the Department of English, University of Calcutta, and a founding member of the University’s Women’s Research Centre.

Rituparna Roy is an independent scholar. She has previously been lecturer in English Literature at Basantivedi College, Kolkata and was a visiting fellow at IIAS from September 2009 to May 2012.

Registration
Please register if you would like to attend by sending an email to h.m.van.der.minne@iias.nl.
 

(*AAS = Association for Asian Studies; ICAS= International Conventional of Asia Scholars)