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- W1967277760 abstract "Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India Priya Joshi (bio) Q. D. Leavis opens her classic and caustic account of the novel, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), by documenting the British public’s immense affection for the genre. She reports that although novels comprised approximately a third of the total holdings in British public libraries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were requested more than four times as often as works of nonfiction. From this, Leavis concludes: [C]onsidering that the 11 percent minority which takes advantage of its right to borrow books from the public libraries is probably the more enterprising section of the poorer reading public, [this] shows convincingly enough the supremacy of fiction and the neglect of serious reading which characterise the age. 1 “The supremacy of fiction and the neglect of serious reading”—the remainder of Leavis’s magisterial study proceeds to dismantle any hint of parataxis between the two phrases. It is precisely the supremacy of fiction in mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain that bred the neglect of “serious” reading in the twentieth, concludes Leavis trenchantly, amassing a formidable body of research in what became the first study of its kind to include—indeed, to introduce—the category of readership into the systematic analysis of a literary genre. For Leavis, reading bad fiction meant liking it and looking for more of it, thus leading to a decline in the novel from the days when it had “serious standards” (123). This article is part of a larger study on the emergence of the novel in [End Page 196] 196 India from its introduction under the aegis of nineteenth-century British colonial policies through the late 1980s. My research on the success of British popular fiction in the colonies documents virtually identical readership figures in India as Leavis does for Britain, yet my conclusions are markedly different. The British novel of “serious standards” was introduced in India in the nineteenth century as a means of propagating and legitimating Englishness in the colony. Yet the fiction consumed most voraciously—discussed, copied, translated, and “adapted” most avidly into Indian languages, and eventually into the Indian novel—was not the novel of “serious standards” but the work of what are often considered minor British novelists whose fortunes soared for several generations among enthusiastic and loyal Indian readers long after they had already waned in Britain. Despite this apparent “neglect of serious reading,” the Indian novel ascended to “serious standards.” In order to better understand this process and the subsequent morphology of the Indian novel, this article documents the culture of books and reading in nineteenth-century India with particular attention to the pervasiveness of British popular fiction in the colony. A few remarks on the novel as a genre are germane at this point. Questions on the origins of the English novel have spawned an academic research industry devoted primarily to identifying the novel’s sources in England and the reasons behind its subsequent literary hegemony. 2 The actual forms that the English novel took have tended not to be as much an issue for researchers as its origins have been. With the novel in India, however, exactly the opposite is true: understanding the origin of the novel is not a problem, though understanding its trajectory is. Why the novel arose in the forms it did and when it did in India are the object of my study, which owes several key insights to research conducted on the English novel. Inspired by Leavis and what she terms her “anthropological” research, mine too turns to the actual readers of fiction in colonial India in an attempt to understand the forces behind the genre’s ascendance. My implicit premise is that if the British novel was a success in India in certain select forms, its colonial readers made it so; therefore, studying readership patterns (that is, the novel’s consumption) from extant records might provide the clearest key to uncovering the processes of cultural transmission (and eventually the novel’s production) in a colonial and, later, postcolonial context. Here, recognizing the disjunctions between the novel’s actual readers in India..." @default.
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- W1967277760 date "1998-01-01" @default.
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- W1967277760 title "Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India" @default.
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- W1967277760 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.1998.0009" @default.
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