ABSTRACT
The introduction situates the study within the field of postcolonial studies and opens this field towards an engagement with the critical and aesthetic theory of the Frankfurt School; it outlines chapters with a view to establishing the centrality of the twentieth-century novel to discourses of individuality, sovereignty and freedom, which marked processes of decolonisation in India, while also outlining the current redundancy of these categories of freedom and citizenship (especially under the twin forces of market and religious/cultural fundamentalism in India). Borrowing from T.W. Adorno’s notion of late style, the overview suggests that works of literature and art that appear to have been obsoleted by time can offer unanticipated perspectives on the past – on history, as well as assumptions about biography and a given literary oeuvre – and therefore, a vision of new or other futures for a current readership precisely because the animating concerns of these novels are no longer bound to their originating framework in the nation.
