English

Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

The essay focuses on the uncharacteristically good production quality of the contemporary novels of master crime writer Surender Mohan Pathak by the publishing house Raja Pocket Books since 2009. Placing his novels against the contemporary pulp fiction from the small presses, the essay argues the birth of a pulp novel as an artefact for consumption by the middle classes and the implications it has on the way crime fiction is articulated in Hindi literary and production histories. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories

From the colloquial to the ‘literary’: Hindi pulp’s journey from the streets to the bookshelves

This volume maps the breadth and domain of genre literature in India across seven languages (Tamil, Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Odia, Marathi and English) and nine genres for the first time. Over the last few decades, detective/crime fiction and especially science fiction/fantasy have slowly made their way into university curricula and consideration by literary critics in India and the West. However, there has been no substantial study of genre fiction in the Indian languages, least of all from a comparative perspective. This volume, with contributions from leading national and international scholars, addresses this lacuna in critical scholarship and provides an overview of diverse genre fictions. Using methods from literary analysis, book history and Indian aesthetic theories, the volume throws light on the variety of contexts in which genre literature is read, activated and used, from political debates surrounding national and regional identities to caste and class conflicts. It shows that Indian genre fiction (including pulp fiction, comics and graphic novels) transmutes across languages, time periods, in translation and through publication processes. While the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial genre literature production, it also draws connections to individual, centuries-long literary traditions of genre literature in the Indian subcontinent. Further, it traces contested hierarchies within these languages as well as current trends in genre fiction criticism. Lucid and comprehensive, this book will be of great interest to academics, students, practitioners, literary critics and historians in the fields of postcolonialism, genre studies, global genre fiction, media and popular culture, South Asian literature, Indian literature, detective fiction, science fiction, romance, crime fiction, horror, mythology, graphic novels, comparative literature and South Asian studies. It will also appeal to the informed general reader. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

World University root node

Indian genre fiction: Pasts and future histories

The manifesto proposed new approaches to understanding the translations industry and the distribution and reception of genres, along with alternative ways of conceptualising genre themes and motifs, while reconstructing the historical matrix to analyse differences and similarities between genres. Rieder argues that genre fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and horror, describes an entirely new phenomenon, which the ‘genre as narrative form’ usage/category does not capture. One such expectational outcome in the intersection of the historical and the formal is offered by the ubiquitous use of myth in genre fictionfrom India. Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, as a pioneer of genre fiction in India, was a staunch critic of nationalism, even though he was arguably one of the foremost social reformers of the colonial period. Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories is the one of the first academic engagements on a field that deserves deeper investigation and, in doing so, brings many languages, genres, and perspectives together. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity; individual chapters, the contributors.

Introduction: Indian genre fiction - languages, literatures, classifications

This article surveys four cognitive strategies readers unwittingly use as they “concretize” the fictional worlds they encounter in fictional texts. The strategies are: the application of the “principle of minimal departure”; the use of “scripts”; the use of generic literary conventions; and the use of “theory of mind.” The article demonstrates that these strategies are “interpretive” in that they entail the use of various kinds of knowledge from outside the fictional text in order to enable the reader’s immersion in the fictional world. Most interestingly, the reader carries out these strategies entirely unawares. The latter part of this article focuses on the peculiarities of reader response that make such a phenomenology not only possible, but necessary.

The EFL Journal

Unwitting Interpreters: Some Cognitive Strategies Used by Readers of Fiction

This essay responds to current scholarship as it explains the poor person’s horror of dissection in the Victorian period as part of a long and complex process of deprivation. Working with the Anatomy Act (1832) and the New Poor Law (1834) as its backdrop, this essay examines three anxieties that were inseparable from the pauper’s existence: the social embarrassment attendant on the loss of personal belongings, especially clothes; the humiliation forced upon workhouse inmates by the New Poor Law diet; and the existential foreboding triggered by the prospect of postmortem dissection. It culminates in a consideration of the early works of Charles Dickens, who found in fiction a set of strategies that allowed early Victorians simultaneously to register and to compensate for these anxieties. © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University.

Victorian Studies

From dispossession to dissection: The bare life of the english pauper in the age of the anatomy act and the new poor law

SOAS University of London

Many Mahabharatas: Linking mythic re-tellings in contemporary India

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Digitalia

Albums in the attic. An Investigation of photographic metadata

Letters of 1916 is Ireland's first public engagement digital humanities project. Begun in September 2013, it collects, digitises, transcribes, encodes and makes available through its electronic platform epistolary documents written about Ireland between 1 November 1915 and 31 October 1916. This paper analyses the volunteer community associated with the project, inspects the levels of its engagement, studies its interests and motivations and considers how future projects can adapt this investigation into projects addressing community interactions. The basis for this inspection is a user survey carried out in Spring 2016, alongside an analysis of the transcriber community using data on transcriber activity from the beginning of the project in September 2013 to June 2016. The paper argues that the success of a public engagement project lies in the understanding of its community—an understanding derived within a critical framework, inspected through data analysis and communicated through visualisations.