Reviving the “Great Tradition” of the British Novel: Realism and Transparency in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
Published twelve years after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) has received comparatively little scholarly attention. A prodigious feat of unmagical mimeticism, this massive novel marks a striking divergence from the bulk of postcolonial fiction: Seth r...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2021
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | Published twelve years after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) has received comparatively little scholarly attention. A prodigious feat of unmagical mimeticism, this massive novel marks a striking divergence from the bulk of postcolonial fiction: Seth reanimates the “Great Tradition” of the English novel as it is notably represented by Jane Austen and George Eliot, throwing into sharp relief the notion of transparency. This paper argues that Seth’s ostentatious resumption of the realist project of the nineteenth century does not by any means exhaust itself in an autotelic exercise or a docile reproduction. |
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