Skip to content
Home/ R.K Narayan
R.K Narayan

R.K Narayan

by Grene, Nicholas
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780746309544

The Indian novelist R.K. Narayan was a key figure in the development of a distinctive postcolonial literature. This detailed critical study covers all of Narayan's work, offering an accessible introduction to his life and fiction with detailed analyses of the major novels. Although the chapters take the reader through the successive phases of his career, they are organised on a thematic rather than a chronological basis to allow a focus on the most significant critical issues his work raises. While the introduction sketches the outline of his life, the first chapter explores how his own background was developed into the fictional South Indian small town of Malgudi, the setting for almost all his work. The second chapter deals with the controversial issue of Narayan's politics, and the common criticism of his writing as insufficiently politically engaged. The central chapter of the book focuses on the submerged fables that animate some of his key novels, including his best known, The Guide. The fourth chapter considers Narayan's attitudes toward modernity as reflected in his essays and his fiction. Finally, there is an analysis of Narayan as storyteller and the special styles he devised to tell his elliptical, subtle and understated tales.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateDec 31, 2010
ISBN-100746309546
ISBN-139780746309544
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-08-19 23:05
$42.98
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Asian - Indic
See all
Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India
Burton, Antoinette
$80.40
Ghalib: 1797-1869: Life and Letters
Ghalib: 1797-1869: Life and Letters
$22.20
Virgin Fish of Babughat: Babughater Kumari Maachh
Bhattacharya, Lokenath
$16.95
Oxford India Tagore: Selected Writings on Education and Nationalism
<em>The Oxford India Tagore</em> focuses on Rabindranath Tagore's views on nationalism and his work on education through his essays, letters, lectures, addresses, and poetry edited by Uma Das Gupta. Tagore's writings are given as substantial excerpts or as full texts in order to enable the reader to follow his argument closely and seriously. <br>Divided into five sections - 'Autobiographical', 'Founding a New Education', 'The Problem of India', 'East and West in the Scientific Age', and 'A Self-Respecting Nationalism as Our Salvation' - the volume takes readers closer to Tagore's life and thought, and shows how persistently he sought a solution to the problems of his times in a new and creative education and in national self-reliance, rather than in the political road to the Western model of a territorial nation-state. The book makes it clear that in many ways Tagore's educational work and his own nationalism were rooted in an original vision of India's history which amounted to a deviation from both the colonialist historiography and the nationalist ideology of those times. The book will be a valuable addition to the 'Oxford India' series which include the writings of Ghalib, Premchand, Ramanujan, Nehru, and Gandhi. This edition will appeal to all those who adore Tagore, as also students and researchers of Indian history, culture, and literature.
$60.00
Grey Areas: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Fiction on Ageing
Raja, Ira
$29.95
Nation Across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations
edited by Harish Trivedi.
$50.00