Indian Popular Fiction: NEW GENRES, NOVEL SPACES

Description

Prem Kumari Srivastava and Mona Sinha’sIndian Popular Fiction: New Genres, Novel Spacesis a big intervention in the way ‘popular’ genres in India are read, understood and analysed. In order to redefine the term ‘popular’, the anthology has included selected critical essays on literary writings, films, media reports and publishers’ accounts among others. The volume, thus, is a reminder that the “Indian popular’ is not only a complex entity of interdisciplinarity, but when it comes to teaching and researching, there are several challenges to its critical and pedagogical practices, particularly for a student of literary studies. -Raj Kumar, Professorand Head, Department of English, University of Delhi

Truly topicalIndian Popular Fiction: New Genres, Novel Spacesby Prem Kumari Srivastava and Mona Sinha of the university of Delhi captures the contemporary currents of change in the rapidly mutating and internet-driven creative and publishing world of Indian popular fiction. With twelve well-researched chapters and a sound introducton, the book uncovers the challenging, experimental and fresh ideas that several young creaive authors of today are innovating with to reach out to their readers. A valuable read for researchers, scholars and ehthusiasts of contemporary Indian popular fiction. -Devapriya Roy, Indian author

The scholarly essays in the bookIndian Popular Fiction: New Genres, Novel Spacesattempt to open up experimental and novel spaces and genres beyond the traditional and the literary world of Indian Popular Fiction as it existed towards the end of the last millennium. They respond to the possibilities opened up by the technology-driven and internet-savvy reading and writing word of today. Contemporaneous and bold, most of the essays resonate with the racy and fast paced milieu and social media space inhabited by today’s youth. Combative in its drift,Indian Popular Fiction: New Genres, Novel Spacesmakes possible an attempt to disband hierarchies and dismantle categories that have engulfed the expansive landscape of Indian Popular Fiction for too long. It facilitates discussion on graphic novels, micro fiction, popular-entertainment and political satire on television and celluloid,social media-driven romances existing in the domain of the ‘real’ rather than that of ‘fantasy’ and mythological readings against the backdrop of gender and politics. Aimed at facilitating further research by scholars and enthusiasts of Indian popular fiction, this book is also an ode to the current trends generated by social and internet media cosmos.

Prem Kumari Srivastavais Associate Professor of English at Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi. Her seminal workLeslie Fiedler: Critic, Provocateur, Pop Culture Guru(2014), McFarland & Inc. Publishers, North Carolina, USA is housed in 144 global librarie; her three volumes series (co-edited)Cultures of the Indigenous: Indian and Beyond(Vol.1), 2014,Deterritorialising Diversities: Literatures of the Indigenous and Marginalised(Vol. II), 2014, andRe-storying the Indigenous and the Popular Imaginary(Vol. III), 20117; andSpiritual Ecology and Sustainability: Practice and Confluence(co-edited) 2017, Authorspress, Delhi, display an overarching focus on gender, the popular and the indigenous, and spiritual ecology.

Mona Sinhais Associate Professor of English at Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi where she has been teaching for more than two decades. Some of her areas of academic interest are Indian Literature, Classical Literature, Translation Studies, Modern Literature, Media and Cultural Studies and innovative practices in language pedagogy. She has edited journals such asCreative Forumand FORTELL. She enjoys translating, has written newspaper articles and has authored book chapters and several research papers on language proficiency, feminist studies and popular culture. Her current research interest is television and gender studies, an area in which she has international as well as national publications to her credit.