| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora (1910) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), literary works which employ the fiction of nativity to examine a paradoxical moment of historical origin, the idea of the nation is subjected to intolerable strain. Fables of identity are constructed in both novels, yet instead of a 'hardening' of the metaphysical idea that sustains the allegorical parallel, what we witness is a radical dissolution or disintegration of the categories of nation and narrative at the very site of their inscription. I will argue that in both works, the symbolic equation of novel and nation opens up fissures in historical experience.
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