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In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.
After The Pioneer Works By Scholars Such As Naik, Narasimhaiah And Mukherjee, And The Thirty Years Of Silence Which Followed Their Ground-Breaking Achievements, The Companion Appears On The Scene Striving To Reinvigorate The Tradition Of Panoramic Studies Of Indian Literature In English. In The Intervening Period, Indian Fiction In English Has Become Of Paramount Importance In The Wide Context Of Postcolonial Studies: An Emergent Crop Of Novelists Belonging To The So-Called New Generation Has Colourfully Paved The Way Towards New Artistic Horizons, Re-Interpreting Western-Derived Literary Models With Inventive Approaches. Complementary To Their Role There Is The Articulate Presence Of A Host...
Neighbourly relations frequently position a “self” against an “Other”. This is the case for both individuals and nations, and, indeed, within the various cultural groups of a nation. Our racial, ethnic, social, or gender identities are often created in demarcating ourselves by stereotyping the Other. Disrespect of the immediate neighbour based on stereotypical pre-conceptions and cultural biases may lie dormant for a long time and then, as shown in recent conflicts around the globe, suddenly surface due to changed economic and political conditions. Media, including films and fictional as well as non-fictional texts, feature prominently in producing, propagating, and maintaining cultu...
Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.
The ten chapters collected in this book manifest the current global interest in trans-border dialogues and trace the origins and development of Italian and Bengali internationalisms in the period from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. Despite having differing political statuses and lacking a shared geographical or historical space, Bengal and Italy remained uniquely connected and, at times, actively sought to transcend different kinds of constraints in their search for a significant dialogue and mutual enrichment in the fields of literature, music, architecture, art, cinema, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, travels, education and intellectual engagement. In this context, the volume confronts strategies of evaluation adopted by prominent representatives of the Bengali and Italian cultural environments with particular emphasis on readings embedded in the moment of contact. Both regions benefitted from this ‘elective affinity’ as they advanced along their respective paths towards a fuller awareness of their specific identity, and thus set a positive example of transcultural understanding which may inspire today’s world.
Today, Indian Writing in English or Indo-Anglian Writing has certainly come of age, with the novel having a pride of place and names such as Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga prominently figuring in the list. But the credit for placing Indo-Anglian writing on a high pedestal should go to earlier writers like Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao. Among these, R.K. Narayan is the most celebrated novelist. This edited volume deals with several important Malgudi novels of R.K. Narayan, such as Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The English Teacher and The Guide and short stories, and throws light on various aspe...
This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century. The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, ...
Rice is a widely consumed crop around the world that has tremendous importance and is cultivated almost everywhere except Antarctica. However, various biotic and abiotic stresses have a negative effect on rice cultivation, seriously reducing its yield. This volume examines the bacterial and fungal pathogens that cause rice diseases and explores how to manage these diseases. It covers the economic and environmental impact of rice fungal diseases on global food security and proceeds to delve into diagnostic methods for rice fungal pathogen detection and discusses current strategic and applied biotechnological methods for the effective management of rice fungal diseases.
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