3 Review(s)

A constant concern of Naipaul’s novels and travel writing is the negotiation of where the individual is situated. Many of his fictional figures remain unhoused, displaced, uprooted with no distinct place called ‘home’ to be proud of and are, therefore, located on the margins of fixed and shifting identities. In formal terms, Naipaul experiments along the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, in particular travel writing, and often fuses genres to give birth to new ones. On the occasion of Naipaul’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature this anthology presents a perceptive assessment of some of his important works of fiction and travel writing and puts into perspective his contribution to literature as a whole. About the Author Rajeshwar Mittapalli is Associate Professor of English at Kakatiya University, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India. His published works of criticism include The Novels of Wole Soyinka and Indian Women Novelists and Psychoanalysis. So far he has edited 16 anthologies of literary essays. They include Post-modernism and English Literature, Indian Fiction in English, Studies in Indian Writing in English, Volume 1 & 2, Post-Independence Indian English Fiction, Commonwealth Fiction: Twenty-first Century Readings, Modern American Literature and IT Revolution, Globalization and the Teaching of English. Dr. Mittapalli is currently the editor of The Atlantic Literary Review published from New Delhi. Earlier he was the Associate Editor of Kakatiya Journal of English Studies for several years. He has published 32 articles on Indian, African and American fiction and ELT in such reputed journals as New Quest, ARTSresearch, Indian Literature, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Commonwealth Quarterly, The Commonwealth Review and Revaluations. Michael Hensen teaches English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany. He has widely published on Arnold Wesker, Salman Rushdie and mythical violence in English drama. He edited, with Annette Pankratz, The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence (2001). His current research interests include contemporary Indo-English novels, identities in post-colonial literatures, narratology and 20th-century British drama and film. Table of Contents 1. Naipaul’s Nobel 2. The Novel of Migration 3. The Politics of Fluidity in A Bend in the River 4. V.S. Naipaul’s Quest for a Voice of his Own: The Enigma of Arrival and Half a Life 5. “I am the Sum of my Books”: The Trails, Trials, and Tribulations of V.S. Naipaul 6. V.S. Naipaul’s Vulcanization of Travel and Fiction Paradigms 7. Better Simply to Endure: Naipaul’s Travels without Humour 8. V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: Caricature as Social and Political Criticism 9. Young Monkey, New Tricks: Foreman’s Apprenticeship in V.S. Naipaul’s The Suffrage of Elvira