V. S. Naipaul and World Literature

This book engages with Naipaul's literary corpus and reconceptualizes what it means to be a writer of world literature.

Vijay Mishra (Author)

9781009433860, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 February 2024

272 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.55 kg

'A highly accomplished and astutely theorized work that straddles literary criticism, literary biography, book history, archive studies, and world literature studies, it is an expertly constructed study of an author, his published and unpublished works, and his contexts. The study contributes to several disciplines while offering deep insights into Naipaul and his work to general literary readers with an interest in modern and contemporary world literary history.' Jenni Ramone, Journal of Postcolonial Writing

V. S. Naipaul is a major and controversial figure in postcolonial and world literature. This book provides a challenging and uncompromisingly honest study that engages with history, genre theory, aesthetics, and global literary culture, with close reference to Naipaul's published and archival material. In his fiction and creative histories, the definition of the modern idea of world literature is informed by the importance of an artistic ordering of perception. Although often expressing ideas that are prejudicial and morally repugnant, there is an honesty in his writings where one finds extraordinary insights into how life is experienced within colonial structures of power. These colonial structures provided no abstract unity to the field of literary expression and ignored vernacular cultures. The book argues that a universal ideology of the aesthetic, transcending time, regions, and languages, provides world literature with a unity which is possible only within a critical universal humanism attuned to heroic readings of texts and cultures.

List of archival material
Acknowledgments
Prologue Lacrimae Rerum, 'The Tears of Things'
Introduction
1. V S. Naipaul aesthetic ideology and world literature
2. 'The English language was mine
the tradition was not'
3. The indenture social imaginary: a House for Mr Biswas and after
4. Empires, slaves, rebels and revolutions
5. In the shadow of the master: a Bend in the River
6. The travel book and wounded civilizations
Epilogue: the death of the author
Notes
Works cited and select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]