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Title “Postmodernist Occasions: Language, Fictionality and History in South Asian Novels”

Author(s) Ms. Ayesha Ashraf

Abstract ABSTRACT Thesis Title: Postmodernist Occasions: Language, Fictionality and History in South Asian Novels This dissertation aims to explore postmodernist occasions in Muhammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Amitav Gosh’s The Glass Palace, and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows by employing the theoretical lenses of Jean Francois Lyotard and Linda Hutcheon. The research draws its interest to explore the postmodernist occasions in the selected texts regarding language, fictionality, and history. Through textual analysis, this study critically scrutinizes the novels in the light of Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction in order to investigate the multiplicity of histories. It explores the subversion of grand narratives of science, war, identity, nationalism, professionalism, history and faith through the idea of language games proposed by Lyotard. Moreover, it evaluates the strategies incorporated in the texts that reflect postmodern language that is ironic and flexible enough to carry the contextulised sensibilities. The research reveals that the selected novels as metafiction reject the ideology of modern fiction though they still retain some of its aspects. This dissertation is divided into seven chapters comprising of introduction, literature review, theoretical framework and research methodology, textual analysis (three sub chapters) and conclusion. It is a qualitative, exploratory and interpretive study. Since it is a qualitative research, therefore textual analysis has been used a research method in order to read language, fictionality, and history in the selected texts. As this study aims to trace the postmodernist occasions in the selected novels, it is likely to contribute to the production of knowledge in English literary studies. Keywords: Meta-narratives, Historiographic Metafiction, Fictionality, Language games, South Asian Novels.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2020-01-15

Subject English Literature

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