Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts

Esterino Adami is an Associate Professor of English language and translation at the University of Turin, Department of Humanities, Italy. His main research areas include critical stylistics, postcolonial writing, and sociolinguistics. He has published articles and book chapters on lexical aspects of Indian English, naming and ideology in the postcolonial Indian world, metaphors for languages, the narrative rendition of specialised discourse (botany, food, the railways), and the semiotics of comics. He has authored Railway Discourse: Linguistic and Stylistic Representations of the Train in the Anglophone World (2018) and co-edited Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness (2017, with F. Bellino and A. Mengozzi) and Within and Across: Language and Construction of Shifting Identities in Post-Colonial Contexts (2012, with A. Martelli).

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

1.1 Language, Style, and Variation in Indian English Literary Texts

1.2 Aims of the Book and Case Studies

1.3 For a New Methodological Paradigm: Postcolonial Stylistics

1.4 Overview of the Book

2. Indian English across Texts and Discourses

2.1 English in/and India

2.2 Indian English(es) and Linguistic/Stylistic Variation

2.3 Literary Texts and Contemporary Indian English Authors

3. Otherness, Style and Indian English ‘Decadent’ Fiction

3.1 The Language of Otherness in the Postcolonial Indian World

3.2 Author, Text, and Context: Jeet Thayil

3.3 Otherness and the Construction of Drug Discourse

3.4 Of Poets, Saints, and Sinners: Indian English and Postcolonial Heteroglossia

4. The Voices of ‘Lament’ in Indian English Literature

4.1 Language, Lament, and Literature

4.2 Author, Text and Context: Deepa Anappara

4.3 Constructing Empathy, Irony, and Texture

4.4 Author, Text, and Context: Avni Doshi

4.5 Remembering, Forgetting: Loss, Memory, and Identity

5. Languaging the Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction

5.1 Representing the Senses in Language and Fiction

5.2 Author, Text, and Context: Tabish Khair

5.3 The Pragmatics of Senses: Embodiment, Perception, and Suspense

5.4 Author, Text, and Context: Megha Majumdar

5.5 "You smell like smoke": Language, Sense(s), and Identity

6. Conclusions

6.1 More Tools and Theories for Indian English in Fictional Texts

6.2 Further Research: Other Genres and Research Extensions

Index