Parution : Commonwealth Essays and Studies

Parution du numéro 31.2 de la revue Commonwealth Essays and Studies (160 pages, 14 euros, ISSN 0395-6989).
La revue est disponible à la Boutique des Cahiers des Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (PSN), 8 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005, téléphone 01 40 46 48 02. La boutique est ouverte de 13h30 à 18h tous les jours de semaine. Vous pouvez également vous la procurer en écrivant à Kerry-Jane Wallart, kjwallart@yahoo.fr, elle vous sera envoyée par la poste.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Marta DVORAK, "Foreword"

CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN WRITING: AN OVERVIEW
Shyamala A. NARAYAN (Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi), "Recent Trends in Indian English Fiction"
Muneeza SHAMSIE, "Covert Operations in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction"
Bharathi HARISHANKAR (Madras), "About Dalit Literature: Text and Context"

PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT
John THIEME (University of East Anglia), "Out of Place? The Poetics of Space in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost"
Vassilena PARASHKETOVA (London South Bank University), “ ‘Falling off’ the Urban Map: Cartographic Divisions and Travel in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh
Sneharika ROY (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), “The White Tiger: The Beggar’s Booker”
Maria-Sabina ALEXANDRU (Bucarest), “Performative Symbols and Structures in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”
Sabine LAURET (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), “The Archaeological Narrative in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines”
Cynthia CAREY (Paris IX-Dauphine), “‘Dismantling the Colonial Dream’ in Leonard Woolf’s Autobiography”

ANITA DESAI
Marta DVORAK (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), “The Politics of Language and the Poetics of Creolization in Anita Desai’s In Custody”
Claire OMHOVERE (Montpellier), “Incorporating Otherness: Food Imagery in Anita Desai’s In Custody”
Colette SELLES (Toulouse II), “Anita Desai’s In Custody and the English Legacy”
Christian GUTLEBEN (Nice), “Generic Displacement: Difference and Repetition in Anita Desai’s Campus Novel”
Christine LORRE (Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle), “Anita Desai’s Bestiary, or How In Custody Responds to The Panchatantra”
Suhasini VINCENT (Paris II-Panthéon Assas), “A Descent down the Ladder of Time in Anita Desai’s The Zigzag Way”

REVIEWS
Corinne ALEXANDRE-GARNER (Paris X-Nanterre) : Pied Piper of Lovers by Lawrence Durrell. Ed. & introduced by James Gifford.
Laetitia ZECCHINI (CNRS) : And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women. Ed. by Muneeza Shamsie.
Catherine LANONE (Toulouse II) : The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s In Custody. By Marta Dvorak.

FOREWORD
This replete special issue of 16 articles and 3 reviews devoted to South Asian fiction and converging to focus on Anita Desai provides a wide variety of scholarly thought and transnational dialogue, for the contributors range from renowned Indian and Pakistani writers and critics to eminent European specialists in the field as well as emerging young scholars.

The first section offers an overview of contemporary Indian and Pakistani fiction, but also of Tamil Dalit writing. It engages with the refracted relations between poetics and place which serve as a guiding thread throughout the discussions in this volume. The second section provides a multifaceted discussion of diachronic and geographical breadth, focusing on writers ranging from Ceylon-based Leonard Woolf to Ghosh, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and the 2008 Man Booker Prize recipient Aravind Adiga. The third section is devoted to internationally renowned Anita Desai, whose novel In Custody was consecrated in France by being made a set text for the prestigious national postgraduate Agrégation examinations in 2009.

While the journal customarily runs notices of critical publications but not of fiction, this editor has enhanced the special nature of this issue investigating the protean South Asian literary scene by including reviews of two landmark fictional works. James Gifford’s new edition of Lawrence Durrell’s first novel Pied Piper of Lovers, unavailable since the 1930s, is a literary event valuable to scholars of Modernism and postcolonial studies alike. There is also the new US, expanded edition of Muneeza Shamsie’s anthology of Pakistani women writers, originally published in India, then Pakistan, setting up a depth of field for the article Shamsie has contributed to this volume, and, more generally, for the issue’s broader investigation of fertile encounters and multiple reconfigurations in which heterotopian cartographies resonate with contrapuntal harmonic architecture, or else the pictorial di/tryptich forms traditionally embodying the transformational dynamics of interconnectedness.
Marta DVORAK