Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste

Download or read book Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste written by Toral Jatin Gajarawala and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 writings 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?