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Realism is an artistic practice that aims to faithfully represent reality. Historically, it has been practiced across different media, from early pictorial art and epic oral narratives, through literature and visual arts, to film, music, and digital media. However, an understanding of what it means to "faithfully represent reality" is not universal; rather, it varies from culture to culture. The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms approaches realism as a transnational, transhistorical, and intermedial global phenomenon. It brings the diversity of global realisms to the fore, showcasing previously underrepresented and marginalized theories, practices, forms, and media of realist cultural production.
The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.
Is Urdu the language of Muslims? Or, to be more precise, the language of Indian Muslims? In modern-day India, is Urdu a language of Upper India? What of the Deccan plateau, then, which was once the cradle of Urdu? Can the India south of the Vindhyas lay claim to Urdu? What of the sweet cadences of the Urdu of the Malwa region or the princely states of Bhopal and Hyderabad or even the rural hinterland of present-day Telangana, which has suffused Urdu with a lilting charm over a period of slow distillation spanning several centuries? So, whose Urdu is it anyway? As long as Urdu is yoked to a religion—Islam—and a certain community—the Muslims—it will never be understood in its entirety....
This monograph examines the connection between progressivism and feminist movements in the Indian subcontinent, scrutinizing shifting portrayals of women in Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry at the time of her writing from a historical perspective, and the historical, political, social and personal influences reflected in her work and life.
Contributed literary collection from Bengali, Urdu and Hindi.
Based on Indian Musilim women.
Premchand's fiction has been translated before, but seldom did these translations reveal the many facets of his literary genius, nor did they show the wide variety of 'types' he was capable of portraying. For, Premchand wrote not only about villains and martyrs, poverty, rigid social order or caste disparities. His world, seemingly black and white though it is, is also lit by flashes of wit and humour, gentle irony and a persistent social commentary. While Premchand's favourite characters - bhang-drinking pandits, miserable sweepers and arrogant Thakurs - do eature in this collection, this is perhaps the first time that the English reader will be introduced to his 'other' world - a world of unbelievably good men, lovesick young girls, and a penniless braggart's self-delusion.
Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. Essays in this historical exploration trace how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, from the ancient to the precolonial period. This book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in the projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature. The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies such as Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces such as the elite, women, the king in the bed chamber, the court with dancing girls, public areas such as orchards and gardens and performance spaces.
In 1947, young Jawad Hassan gives up his ancestral home in India and his fiancee Maimuna for a dream country founded by Jinnah. And even though the newly created state of Pakistan is thronged by a huge number of zealous Muslims ready to lead from the front, the rapid breakdown of law and order in Karachi makes many, like Jawad, retreat into reminiscences of their past in undivided India. The second in Intizar Husain's acclaimed trilogy, The Sea Lies Ahead takes up the story of Pakistan where the first novel Basti (1979) ended: poised on the verge of breaking off from its eastern arm. This is a novel about those muhajirs, the author himself among them, who went to the promised Land of the Pure and were met with mistrust, prejudice and apathy. Equally, it is a rich portrait of the new culture of urban Pakistan fostered by people who came from the countless towns and hamlets in and around Lucknow, Meerut and Delhi. Bringing alive unforgettable characters with its sparkling prose, this novel is a powerful exploration of Islamic history and the story of Pakistan's great disillusionment.
Kabhi hum bhi tum bhi thhe aashna tumhein yaad ho ke na yaad ho Once you and I were friends, whether you remember it now or not--Momin Khan Momin This is a book about love—love for one’s country and for all that goes to make it one we can be proud to belong to. Poetry, it has been said, flourishes when all else is uncertain. With that in mind, renowned literary historian and translator, Rakhshanda Jalil, uses Urdu poetry to look at how the social fabric of secular India is changing. Rakhshanda delves into the past, to the events that have threatened communal harmony, from the bloodletting of partition, or the politics of successive elections, to communal riots, Mumbai, Gujarat and so on,...