• What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī

    Author(s):
    Preetha Mani (see profile)
    Date:
    2019
    Group(s):
    LLC South Asian and South Asian Diasporic, TC Postcolonial Studies, TC Translation Studies, TC Women’s and Gender Studies
    Subject(s):
    Realism, Literature, History, Short stories, Hindi literature, Hindi language
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Short story, Modernism, Literary history, Short story (genre), Hindi
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/amnd-ap31
    Abstract:
    This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1215/00104124-7546181
    Publisher:
    Duke University Press
    Pub. Date:
    September 2019
    Journal:
    Comparative Literature
    Volume:
    71
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    226 - 251
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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