Title: Structures of negation
First published: 1993
Description: Despite almost three decades of sustained literary activity and a body of work that includes eleven novels and five volumes of poetry, Zulfikar Ghose remains a relatively obscure writer. Partly responsible is the difficulty of placing Ghose in any one literary tradition as a result of his experimental approach to language and narrative. This much-needed analysis traces continuities in Ghose's work and illustrates the relation between his changing narrative forms and the experience of marginalization. Ghose who now lives and works in the United States, spent his first seventeen years in India and his next seventeen in England. Chelva Kanaganayakam argues that his quest for new narrative modes is characteristic of the 'native-alien' experience and the search for identity. In the first chapter the formal changes in Ghose's books of verse are used to set up a paradigm for the study as a whole. Chapter two contextualizes the early fiction within two traditions: the Anglo-Indian and the Indo-Anglian. The subsequent chapters deal with the individual novels. Through interesting close readings they chart the journey from mimesis through stream-of-consciousness; picaresque, metafiction, and magic realism. Kanaganayakam also discusses the role of experimentation in post-colonial as well as post-modern writing and addresses the problematic issue of creating a poetics for dealing with post-colonial and marginal experience. During the last few years, issues of nation, nationalism, identity, ideology, and canonicity have become urgent and controversial with respect to post-colonial texts. Kanaganayakam shows that Ghose's writing is very much a response to a complex perception of post-coloniality. This is the first book-length study of Ghose's work.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, Philosophy
People: Zulfikar Ghose (1935-)
LC classification: PS3557.H63 Z75 1993