The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Becoming Readers in Colonial India

The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal explores the reading habits of Bengali novel readers in colonial India, challenging dominant postcolonial scholarship and granting access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is enmeshed with the present.

Format: Hardback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 10 August 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal explores the reading habits of early Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain, to understand how they learned to read unfamiliar genres. It moves from the world of novels, periodicals, letters, and reviews to colonial educational policies, providing a rich literary history of the reading lives of these early readers in colonial India. Sunayani Bhattacharya examines how Bengalis thought about reading, approached the question of influence, and relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models. She challenges dominant postcolonial scholarship by engaging with the lived experience of colonial modernity and tracing the import of Bengali readers' choices on their quotidian lives. The book grants access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is enmeshed with the present.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501398469