Article View
Volume 1 Issue 9 |
February 2015 |
| Postmodern Historical Narratives in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children | |
| Ms. G. Surya, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Arulmigu Kalasalingam College of Arts and Science, Virudhunagar, , |
|
| Abstract | |
| Postmodern Historical Narrative is a theory that insists on the presence of a past material reality beyond discourse and on the possibility of accessing that past. It is one of the alternative ways to define and theorize the historical real and redeem this important vein of fiction from its common association with an ultimately apolitical relativism. Salman Rushdie is one among the best-known representatives of postcolonial fiction in modern British literature. His works carry a deep imprint of the complex socio-cultural scene of India as well as his passionate involvement with the history and the politics of India which has induced many critics to consider him as an Indian writer in English. Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is chosen with the objective of analyzing the postmodern historical narratives, which questions the problematized relations between history and fiction. Rushdie’s postcolonial and postmodern novel Midnight’s Children draws a picture of the time since around 1915 and explains India’s situation after it gained its Independence from the British colonizers; it describes Gandhi’s Quit India movement, the violent partition of India into the new states India and Pakistan, and the State of Emergency from 1975 to 1977 through the eyes of Indian people. In this intensely political and consciousness-raising novel, Rushdie critically analyzes so-called realities through the deconstruction of history. Thus the postmodernist historical novel of Salman Rushdie attempt to insert history into fiction to subvert historical “facts” and rewrite them from a perspective different from the accepted interpretation. | |
| Keywords | |
| Metafiction; Historiographic Metafiction; Salman Rushdie; Midnight’s Children. | |
| Article | |
 Creative Commons |
Recent Articles
About us
Progressive Publishers is a novice publishing enterprise located at Tranquebar, Tamilnadu, India. It primarily publishes university text-books for efficient English language learning and an online scholarly journal entitled Literary Quest. Its primary goal is to promote progressive, secular, socialist and egalitarian thoughts among academicians, researchers and students of English literature. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Social Justice are the ideals upon which the whole enterprise rests.