British Asian Fiction: Framing the Contemporary By Neil Murphy an ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim

This collection seeks not so much to demarcate the literary history of the field under discussion but to offer due acknowledgment of the artistic merit of the selected authors’ works while simultaneously registering their cultural significance. It seeks to demonstrate in situ the virtues of commentary that engages substantially rather than tangentially with fictional works. Without resurrecting the claim that texts are heterocosmic entities, we hope to underscore through this orientation the benefits of less text-distant deliberations. Such a “return to the text” is important because the close attachment of college dynamics and academic careers to developments in critical theory has a way of promoting text-tangential discussions that are often of little use to undergraduate and graduate audiences approaching certain authors for the first time. Whatever one’s views about the emphasis on discourses of alterity in much of contemporary criticism, these projects are not furthered by analyses which marginalise the formal and aesthetic features of fictional works, with the result that widely divergent texts are homogenised by a ready-made critical apparatus.