Print and Pleasure

Orsini, Francesca:
Print and pleasure : popular literature and entertaining fictions in colonial North India / Francesca Orsini. - Ranikhet : Permanent Black, 2009. - xiv, 310 S.
ISBN 978-81-7824-249-1 / 81-7824-249-4
Rs. 695,00
US$ 28,35 (inkl. Airmail) (Biblia Impex)
US$ 40,00 (inkl. Airmail) (Vedams)
DDC: 891.4309

Beschreibung
Print and Pleasure tells the story behind the boom in commercial publishing in nineteenth-century North India.
   How did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make the book a familiar object and a necessary part of people’s leisure in a largely illiterate society? What genres became popular in print? Who read them and how were they read?
   Our perception of North Indian culture in this period has been dominated by the notion of a competition between Hindi and Urdu, and the growth of language nationalism. Print and Pleasure argues that many other forces were also at work which, in the pursuit of commercial interests, spread quite different and much more hybrid tastes.
   The importance of this major new book lies in showing, moreover, that book history can greatly enrich our understanding of literary and cultural history. Francesca Orsini mines a huge and largely untapped archive in order to reveal that popular songbooks, theatre transcripts, meanderingly seralized narratives, flimsily published tales, and forgotten poems are as much a part of colonial history as the elite novels and highbrow journals that are more frequently the subject of historical studies. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Hindi and Urdu Barahmasas in print
3. Songbooks in print
4. Tales between two scripts
5. Generic instability and social mobility: Pandit Ratannath Dar Sarshar's Fasana-E Azad
6. Chandrakanta and early Hindi fiction in Banaras
7. Detective novels
8. Conclusions: India, Europe, and the far east
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Autorin

FRANCESCA ORSINI is Reader in the Literatures of North India at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her previous books include The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002) and the edited volume Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (2006). Profile page.

Quellen: Permanent Black, Black Kite; WorldCat; Biblia Impex; Vedams Books