Narrative authority in the colonial novel

Pinto, Rochelle (2023) Narrative authority in the colonial novel. In: The Oxford handbook of modern Indian literatures. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 576-587. ISBN 9780197647912

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Abstract

A primary challenge confronting 19th-century colonial novels was the wresting of narrative authority from more authoritative discourses that claimed to speak for colonial society. Two novels about Goa reveal that it was not just the epistemic validity of ethnography, philology, and law, but also their structures of representation that impinged on the conventions of this modern literary genre. An instance of this is the ubiquitous narrative of agrarian settlement as the foundation of society in India. The Portuguese novel Os Maharatas represents such origin narratives, as it subsumes early and late modern narrative traditions into its discontinuous structure. In doing so, it enacts the impossibility of epistemic resolution by disabling the novel itself. In contrast, the Konkani novel Battcara mechanically concedes the space of the hero to an undeserving landlord, but inserts the life of a Goan migrant in the interstices of its plot through myriad details. Literary history has tended to view such novels that lack a single coherent schema as tentative precursors to a more perfect mastery of modern literary form. This chapter argues that these novels stage a fundamental challenge of colonial modernity—namely, how a novel could achieve formal autonomy when narrative authority always had to be ceded to another discourse. It suggests that early novels met this challenge by incorporating these discourses into their structure, or by self-consciously staging the impediments to their formation.

Item Type:	Book Section
Authors:	Pinto, Rochelle
Editors:	Editors Email ORCID Anjaria, Ulka UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Nerlekar, Anjali UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
Document Language:	Language English
Uncontrolled Keywords:	colonial, Goa, Portuguese, philology, ethnography
Subjects:	Language Literature & rhetoric History & geography > History of Asia
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Arts and Sciences
Full Text Status:	None
Related URLs:	Library OPAC
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/6835
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197647912.013...

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