ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing forms a theoretical, comprehensive, and critically astute overview of the history and future of Pakistani literature in English. Dealing with key issues for global society today, from terrorism, religious extremism, fundamentalism, corruption, and intolerance, to matters of love, hate, loss, belongingness, and identity conflicts, this Companion brings together over thirty essays by leading and emerging scholars, and presents:
- the transformations and continuities in Pakistani anglophone writing since its inauguration in 1947 to today;
- contestations and controversies that have not only informed creative writing but also subverted certain stereotypes in favour of a dynamic representation of Pakistani Muslim experiences;
- a case for a Pakistani canon through a critical perspective on how different writers and their works have, at different times, both consciously and unconsciously, helped to realise and extend a uniquely Pakistani idiom.
Providing a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to cross-cultural relations and to historical, regional, local, and global contexts that are essential to reading Pakistani anglophone literature, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing is key reading for researchers and academics in Pakistani anglophone literature, history, and culture. It is also relevant to other disciplines such as terror studies, post-9/11 literature, gender studies, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, human rights, diaspora studies, space and mobility studies, religion, and contemporary South Asian literatures and cultures.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|2 pages
Reimagining history The legacy of war and Partition
part II|2 pages
9/11 and beyondContexts, forms, and perspectives
chapter 7|14 pages
Uses of humour in post-9/11 Pakistani anglophone fiction
chapter 8|12 pages
Comic affiliations/comic subversions
chapter 9|10 pages
Resistance and redefinition
part III|2 pages
The dialectics of human rightsPolitics, positionality, controversies
chapter 12|13 pages
Divergent discourses
chapter 14|10 pages
Phoenix rising
chapter 15|11 pages
Writing back and/as activism
part IV|2 pages
Identities in questionShifting perspectives on gender
chapter 16|15 pages
Doing history right
part V|2 pages
Spaces of female subjectivityIdentity, difference, agency
chapter 21|11 pages
British-Pakistani female playwrights
part VI|2 pages
Shifting contextsNew perspectives on identity, space, and mobility
part VII|2 pages
Unsettling narrativesImagining post-postcolonial perspectives
chapter 25|10 pages
Non-human narrative agency
part VIII|2 pages
New horizonsTowards a Pakistani idiom