SALMAN RUSHDIE
.jpg)
Salman Rushdie by ActuaLitté, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates of Birth/Death: 1947-
Nationality: British, Indian
Literary Periods:
- Postwar Period, 1945-1999;
- Twentieth Century, 1900-1999;
- Twenty-First Century, 2000-
Literary Movements:
- Magic Realism, 20th Century;
- Postcolonialism, 20th Century;
- Postmodernism 1963-
Multimedia
A feature interview with author Salman Rushdie. Literature plays an important role in providing insight into society. What can authors like Rushdie do to mend some of the divisions within Islam, and help non-Muslims better understand the faith?
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Activists chant anti-British slogans during a protest against Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" in 2007. Photo courtesy of CNN.com
Critical essay and biography on the life and works of Slaman Rushdie; selected bibliography.
You'll also want to check out...
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window The Modern Language Association of America's database of journal articles, books, dissertations, working papers, proceedings, and bibliographies covering scholarship on literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, printing, publishing, rhetoric, and composition, with coverage from 1926 to the present.
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Rushdie scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
You may also want to check out...
Decentering Rushdie (2010) by
Interrogating current theories of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and aesthetics in Postcolonial Studies, Decentering Rushdie offers a new perspective on the Indian novel in English. Since Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, its postmodern style and postnational politics have dominated discussions of postcolonial literature. As a result, the rich variety of narrative forms and perspectives on the nation that constitute the field have been obscured, if not erased altogether. Reading a range of novels published between the 1950s and 1990s, including works by Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy, Decentering Rushdie suggests an alternative understanding of the genre in postcolonial India. Pranav Jani documents the broad shift from nation-oriented to postnationalist perspectives following the watershed crisis of the Emergency of the 1970s. Recovering the "namak-halaal cosmopolitanism" of early novels--a cosmopolitanism that is "true to its salt"--Decentering Rushdie also explains the rise and critical celebration of postnational cosmopolitanism. Decentering Rushdie thus resituates contemporary literature within a nuanced history of Indian debates about cosmopolitanism and the national question. In the process, Jani articulates definitions of cosmopolitanism and nationalism that speak to the complex negotiation of language, culture, and representation in postcolonial South Asia.
Call Number: Bates PR9492.6.P67 J36 2010ISBN: 9780814211335
Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (2002) by
What do R.K. Narayan, G.V. Desani, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose, Suniti Namjoshi, and Salman Rushdie have in common? They represent Indian writing in English over five decades. Vilified by many cultural nationalists for not writing in native languages, they nonetheless present a critique of the historical and cultural conditions that promoted and sustained writing in English. They also have in common a counterrealist aesthetic that asks its own social, political, and textual questions. This book is about the need to look at the tradition of Indian writing in English from the perspective of counterrealism. The departure from the conventions of mimetic writing not only challenges the limits of realism but also enables Indo-Anglian authors to access formative areas of colonial experience. Kanaganayakam analyzes the fiction of writers who work in this vibrant Indo-Anglian tradition and demonstrates patterns of continuity and change during the last five decades. Each chapter draws attention to what is distinctive about the artifice in each author while pointing to the features that connect them. The book concludes with a study of contemporary writing and its commitment to non-mimetic forms.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 0889203989
Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel (1993) by
Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel focuses on the novels of R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie and explores the tension in these novels between ideology and the generic fictive strategies that shape ideology or are shaped by it. Fawzia Afzal-Khan raises the important question of how much the usage of certain ideological strategies actually helps the ex-colonized writer deal effectively with postcolonial and postindependence trauma and whether or not the choice of a particular genre or mode employed by a writer presupposes the extent to which that writer will be successful in challenging the ideological strategies of "containment" perpetuated by most Western "orientalist" texts and writers. She argues that the formal or generic choices of the four writers studied here reveal that they are using genre as an ideological "strategy of liberation" to help free their peoples and cultures from the hegemonic strategies of "containment" imposed upon them. She concludes that the works studied here constitute an ideological rebuttal of Western writers' denigrating "containment" of non-Western cultures. She also notes that self-criticism, as implied in Rushdie's works, is not be confused with self-hatred, a theme found in Naipaul's work.
Call Number: Bates & Bowdoin PR9492.2 .A4 1993ISBN: 0271009128
South Asian Novelists in English (2003) by
With the publication of Salman Rushdie's Booker Prize winning novel, ^IMidnight's Children^R in 1981, followed by the unprecedented popularity of his subsequent works, the cinematic adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's ^IThe English Patient,^R many other best-sellers written by South Asian novelists writing in English have gained a tremendous following. This reference is a guide to their lives and writings. The volume focuses on novelists born in South Asia who have written and continue to write about issues concerning that region. Some of the novelists have published widely, while others are only beginning their literary careers. The volume includes alphabetically arranged entries on more than 50 South Asian novelists. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a summary of the novelist's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. Since many of the contributors are personally acquainted with the novelists, they are able to offer significant insights. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of studies of the South Asian novel in English, along with a list of anthologies and periodicals.
Call Number: Miller PR9496.2.S6 S68 2003ISBN: 0313318859
Books at Colby
Midnight's Children (1991) by
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and finds himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent-and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts-inner voices and a wildly sensitive sense of smell-we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of this century.
Call Number: PR6068.U757 M5 1991bISBN: 0140132708
The Satanic Verses (1989) by
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jumbo jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures fall to the sea, later washing up, alive, on a beach. It was an ambiguous miracle, for both seem to have acquired curious changes. Both have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil.
Call Number: PR6068.U757 S27 1989ISBN: 0670825379
The Enchantress of Florence (2008) by
A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence. The Enchantress of Florenceis the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing,The Enchantress of Florenceis a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers.
Call Number: PR6068.U757 E53 2008ISBN: 9780375504334
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) by
Salman Rushdie's most ambitious and accomplished novel, sure to be hailed as his masterpiece. At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music. Their epic romance is narrated by Ormus's childhood friend and Vina's sometime lover, her "back-door man," the photographer Rai, whose astonishing voice, filled with stories, images, myths, anger, wisdom, humor, and love, is perhaps the book's true hero. Telling the story of Ormus and Vina, he finds that he is also revealing his own truths: his human failings, his immortal longings. He is a man caught up in the loves and quarrels of the age's goddesses and gods, but dares to have ambitions of his own. And lives to tell the tale. Around these three, the uncertain world itself is beginning to tremble and break. Cracks and tears have begun to appear in the fabric of the real. There are glimpses of abysses below the surfaces of things. The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's most gripping novel and his boldest imaginative act, a vision of our shaken, mutating times, an engagement with the whole of what is and what might be, an account of the intimate, flawed encounter between the East and the West, a brilliant remaking of the myth of Orpheus, a novel of high (and low) comedy, high (and low) passions, high (and low) culture. It is a tale of love, death, and rock 'n' roll.
Call Number: PR6068.U757 G76 1999ISBN: 0805053085
