Dissenters and Mavericks

Writings About India in English, 1765-2000

Margery Sabin

Dissenters and Mavericks

Writings About India in English, 1765-2000

Margery Sabin

Description

Dissenters and Mavericks reinvigorates the interdisciplinary study of literature, history, and politics through an approach to reading that allows the voices heard in writing a chance to talk back, to exert pressure on the presuppositions and preferences of a wide range of readers. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts--from colonial writers such as Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke to twentieth-century Indian writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and Pankaj Mishra--the book proposes a controversial challenge to prevailing academic methodology in the field of postcolonial studies.

Dissenters and Mavericks

Writings About India in English, 1765-2000

Margery Sabin

Reviews and Awards

"Sabin's engagement with her unusual subject is always meticulous and intelligent; and welcome, too, given that it focuses on a nation and a class whose intelligentsia takes itself so seriously."--Times Literary Supplement

"Generous, humane.... It would be an opportunity lost if postcolonial critics did not take up the challenge that Sabin's ceaselessly responsive readings cumulatively pose."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Margery Sabin's Dissenters and Mavericks is, in effect, a moral history of British and postcolonial India, but it could only have been written by a gifted literary scholar. The chapters on Naipaul, Sleeman, and Burke are enormously suggestive, and all of the book will reorient the thoughts of readers who had glimpsed only episodes where Sabin discovers continuity. The book is a splendid achievement--original in conception and steadily rewarding in the detail of its judgments."--David Bromwich, Yale University

"Tough-minded and written with exemplary clarity, Dissenters and Mavericks will stir controversy and in fact invites it, for it is in itself an act of dissent from the current orthodoxies of postcolonial studies. Margery Sabin's work marks a new stage in our attempts to deal with the history of writing about India in English--and new precisely because it might, to some readers, seem old-fashioned in its concern with questions of individuation and idiosyncrasy."--Michael Gorra, Smith College