ABSTRACT
This essay compares Hanif Kureishi’s and Zulfikar Ghose’s novels of self-formation by focusing on the politics of style to question the reading habits of world literature. When viewed through peripheral modernism, Ghose’s The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) is a groundbreaking novel that suggests another way to think about peripheral literature. On the other hand, Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is so widely discussed because it is identified with postcolonialism. His novels draw on Nietzschean concepts that reinforce racial charisma rather than radically re-envisioning the Bildungsroman’s historico-philosophical movement.
