ABSTRACT
This opening chapter outlines the theme of the book, and introduces some pivotal issues such as style, variation, and language in Indian English literary texts, and the scope of this type of fictional discourse, which includes diasporic authors as well. The chapter explains the parameters that govern the entire study and that regard (1) some of the most relevant stylistic and narrative techniques adopted by present-day Indian English authors and (2) the interaction between creativity, conceptualisation, and meaning- creation in text production. In order to examine a range of recent Indian English literary texts (i.e. published over the last ten years), it proposes an interdisciplinary and innovative methodology – the idea of postcolonial stylistics, which adopts and adapts a fruitful combination of different disciplines, including literary linguistics (together with some cognitive frameworks, e.g. Jeffries and McIntyre), sociolinguistics (in particular diatopic variation, i.e. variation across space, with the Indian variety of English, e.g. Sailaja), and postcolonial theory.
