ABSTRACT:
A collection of essays on multiple aspects of Vikram Seth's novel 'A Suitable Boy'. A useful bibliography of criticism on this novel is appended.
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SYNOPSIS:
This collection of essays by diverse hands offers a critical appraisal of the disparate range of themes that make Vikram Seth’s panoramic novel, "A Suitable Boy", worth its weight and heft. It examines Seth’s extensive takes on the issues of inter-faith face-off, language politics, colonial hang-over in postcolonial India, modernity and gender inequity, caste prejudices, and several others in this multi-stranded Indian English novel. The interrogation of the author’s mode of narrating the nation with a variety of calling cards is consistently matched with an incisive probe into the complexity of characters and events located in the socio-cultural milieu of the early postcolonial India of the nineteen-fifties. Besides, with Seth’s concise literary biography and a comprehensive bibliography for those who wish to explore the text further, this anthology is a resource which the readers and researchers can’t afford not to have.
