Bringing Modernity Home? Marathi Literary Theory in the NineteenthCentury
Description
Marathi literary theory emerged only in the second half of the nineteenth
century—when it was “both, possible and necessary”. It emerged as an
ideological need of the hour when popular critical discourse was
absorbing and normalizing the colonial category of literature as (only)
‘creative writing’, a category which was largely absent in the pre-colonial
Marathi cultural tradition. Bringing Modernity Home: Marathi Literary
Theory in the Nineteenth Century seeks to map this epistemic negotiation
through an analysis of eleven texts—also anthologized here— by six
prominent nineteenth century thinkers from western India, Dadoba
Pandurang Tarkhadkar, Mahadeo Moreshwar Kunte, Kashinath Balkrishna
Marathe, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Jotirao Phule and Pandita Ramabai
Sarasvati.
By using, among other resources, the resources of radical liberalism
creatively, these ‘nativist’ intellectuals—in the sense of ‘organic’
intellectuals, engaged with specific local cultural politics— collectively
succeed in presenting an alternative understanding of the notion of
literature—of literature as a cultural institution. The argument of the
book is that this was a theoretically sophisticated understanding of the
concept of literature that would not have been possible within the
ideological framework of nationalism and in that, Marathi literary theory
seems to side-step nationalism and to appropriate colonial modernity in a
forceful way.
Features
- : Bringing Modernity Home? Marathi Literary Theory in the NineteenthCentury
- : Prachi Gurjarpadhye
- : 9789382396116
- : 2014
- : xi+335 pp
- : English
