Untouchable Fictions by Toral Jatin Gajarawala PAPERBACK 9780823245253

Untouchable FictionsLiterary Realism and the Crisis of Caste\nAuthor(s): Toral Jatin Gajarawala\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Fordham University Press, United States\nImprint: Fordham University Press\nISBN-13: 9780823245253, 978-0823245253\nSynopsis\nUntouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism- progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental- in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit (\""untouchable\"" caste) fiction. Drawing on a wide array of fiction from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and [url] Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text, and its radical critique, with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to it.