ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the arguments, purpose and methodology of the book. It defines key concepts – such as “world- making”, “core and periphery” and “combined and uneven development” – that frame the comparative reading of selected Indian and Irish family fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Mahasweta Devi, Jennifer Johnston, Kiran Desai and Anne Enright. The opening chapter foregrounds the relational categories of core and periphery as a necessary corrective to the strictly geoculturalist paradigms affecting current world literature theories. Complicating existing scholarship, the chapter posits family fiction as an inherently “worldly” genre that draws upon private and familial experiences to highlight the entrenched fractures of public life. The introduction makes a case for women’s family fiction as doubly peripheral to the postcolonial public sphere and to the metropolitan world at large. Finally, the brief discussion of each text included in this chapter offers a comprehensive roadmap of the thematic and formal continuities and divergences in Indian and Irish literary world making.
