Millennium’s Children. New trends in South-Asian Postmillennial Anglophone Literature

The South-Asian literary scene, after the breakthrough of the Indian postcolonial novel, is now in its complex entirety a space of extremely lively and variegated narrative production. After the groundbreaking sweep of the 80s and 90s with Rushdie, Roy, Seth, Mistry to set the model, in the third millennium a vast train of authors continue to experiment with a multifarious variety of trends, genres, forms and voices. A new generation of writers chart out a vibrant and energetic literary landscape in which the novelistic and other modes, such as the graphic novel, the autobiography or the diary, question changing notions of authorship and interrogate the role of English in creating reading communities across regional borders. Wishing to contribute to a reflection on the expressive possibilities of narrative prose in English in the 21st century, the editors invited contributors to explore new literary beginnings, foreground subjects, styles and genres, examine the devices preferred by the children of the new Millennium, those heirs of Rushdie’s 1981 novel required to adapt to a particularly challenging contemporary scene. One specific goal was indeed to try to delineate new literary strategies in dealing with a socio-cultural landscape particularly complicated by globalisation. The contributions deal quite obviously with a variety of different issues but have offered also the possibility to infer some lines of possible convergence and organising notions. Thus the articles have been grouped under three headed sections conceived as pertinent to themes roughly regarding: 1) the emerging of a South Asian geo-literary dimension; 2) the updating of diaspora literature; 3) the specific renovation and expansion of the Indian contemporary literary scene.