• Literary and Popular Fiction in Late Colonial Tamil Nadu

    Author(s):
    Preetha Mani (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    LLC South Asian and South Asian Diasporic, TC Postcolonial Studies, TM Literary Criticism
    Subject(s):
    Modernism (Literature), Indian literature, Literary form--Study and teaching, South Asia
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Tamil, Inter-war period, Global modernism, Literary modernism, Genre studies, Postcolonial literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M67M0405K
    Abstract:
    This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to view the purpose of literature in society. While discussions of Indian modernism have sidelined regional and communitarian aesthetic and socio-political concerns, the Maṇikkoṭi-Vikaṭaṉ debates demonstrate that extremely localized, intimate conversations profoundly influenced the trajectory of Tamil modernism. The essay shows how the 1930s literary¬-popular distinction situates Tamil modernism at a tangent to scholarly characterizations of late colonial Indian modernism as preoccupied with anticolonialism and nation-building. The essay argues that Tamil modernism centered on formulating new aesthetic sensibilities aimed at diffusing regional contentions regarding linguistic and caste affiliations-rather than as focused on either developing or subverting Indian nationalist politics.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Routledge
    Pub. Date:
    2019
    Book Title:
    Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories
    Author/Editor:
    Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, Anwesha Maity
    Chapter:
    1
    Page Range:
    17 - 37
    ISBN:
    978-1-138-55998-1
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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