Synopses & Reviews
This volume concentrates on one of the world's oldest, and most buoyant, book cultures: South Asia. It examines the transition from manuscript to hand press, orality and performance, scripts and nationalism, libraries and copyright, and the recent international vogue for Europhone writers from the region.
About the Author
MARY HAMMOND is Senior Lecturer, University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of
Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 and articles on writing, reading and publishing in the Victorian Edwardian periods. She is also co-editor of
Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History.
ROBERT FRASER is Senior Research Fellow in Literature, Open University, UK. He is the author of books on Marcel Proust, Sir James Frazer, Victorian quest romance, print culture and various postcolonial literatures. A serial biographer, he is also a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society.
Table of Contents
List of Figures * List of Tables * Acknowledgments * Notes on Contributors * Introduction--
R.Fraser &
M.Hammond * The 'Book' in India: Orality, Manu-Script, Print, (Post)Colonialism--
H.Trivedi * The Many Worlds of the Vernacular Book: Performance, Literacy and Print in Colonial Bengal--
A.Ghosh * Publishing and Translating Hafez under Empire--
K.Scoular Datta * Missionary Writing and the Self-Fashioning of Assamese Cultural Identity in Colonial India: Revisiting the Past, Understanding the Present--
H.Medhi * Futures Past: Books, Reading, Culture in the Age of Liberalization--
P.Joshi * Book Circulation and Reader Responses in Colonial India--
D.FinkelsteinThacker, Spink and Company: Bookselling and Printing in Mid Nineteenth-Century Calcutta--V.Condie * Two Paradigms of Literary Production: The Production, Circulation and Legal Status of Rudyard Kipling's Departmental Ditties and Indian Railway Library Texts--S.Towheed * War and the Colonial Book Trade: The Case of OUP India--R.Fraser * Between Bloomsbury, Gandhi and Transcultural Modernities: The Publication and Reception of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable--S.Nasta * Talking to India: The Literary Production and Consumption of South Asian Anglophone Writers in Britain, 1940-55--R.Ranasinha * Salman Rushdie and Zulfikar Ghosh in the Literary Marketplace--S.Brouillette * Bibliography * Index