Locating Culture/Articulating Marginality: Analyzing Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire
Keywords:
Discourse, Spatiality, RefashioningAbstract
This paper is a critical engagement with the culture of India as represented in Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire (1998) which at the same time articulates a re-examination of marginalization within the discourses of nationalism. Hyder’s ‘transcreation’ is a brilliant exposition to re-think the categorization of history, as well as exploring and rejecting the form and structure of bourgeois novel. In the paper, I will examine this refashioning of spatiality that critiques and interrogates the difference between the centre and the margins. The peripheral vision of history depicted in the novel by different modes of register will be read as a political statement, which refuses to be circumscribed by the so-called norms of novel writing.
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