Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 169
• Series: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Sir Salman Rushdie is perhaps the most significant living novelist in English. His second novel, Midnight's Children, is regularly cited as the 'Booker of Bookers' and its impact is still being felt throughout in world literature. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to the 'Rushdie Affair' certainly the most significant literary-political event since the Second World War. Rushdie has continued to produce challenging fiction, controversial, thought-provoking non-fiction and has a presence on the world stage as a public intellectual. This collection brings together leading scholars to provide an up-to-date critical guide to Rushdie's writing from his earliest works up to the most recent, including his 2012 memoir of his time in hiding, Joseph Anton. Contributors offer new perspectives on key issues, including: Rushdie as a postcolonial writer; Rushdie as a postmodernist; his use and reuse of the canon; the 'Rushdie Affair'; his responses to 9/11 and to the 'War on Terror'; and issues of more complex philosophical weight arising from his fiction.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
HalfTitle
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Chronology of Salman Rushdie’s Life
INTRODUCTION Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s Literary Impact
Rushdie as a global figure
The ‘Thinking’ of Rushdie’s Work
CHAPTER ONE The Rushdie Canon
The Talisman of the Perforated Sheet
The Rebirth Bug
‘Europe Repeats Itself, in India, as Farce’
CHAPTER TWO Salman Rushdie and the Rise of Postcolonial Studies: Grimus, Midnight’s Children and Shame
Grimus: False Starts and False Voices
Midnight’s Children and the Rise of Postcolonial Studies
Shame and the Palimpsest Nation
Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE Rushdie as an International Writer: The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress
Introduction
Globalization
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
The Enchantress of Florence
Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR Postcolonial Secularism and Literary Form in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Rushdie’s Defence of The Satanic Verses
Provincializing Europe and Reading the Non-Secular in The Satanic Verses
Migration and Postcolonial Modernity in The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses and Its Arabic and Urdu Literary Precursors
Gibreel Farishta and the Identity Formation of British Muslims
The Coexistence of the Secular and the Religious in the Ayesha Chapters
CHAPTER FIVE Revisiting The Satanic Verses: The Fatwa and Its Legacies
CHAPTER SIX Salman Rushdie’s Post-Nationalist Fairy Tales:
Haroun and Luka
Fairy Tale in Haroun and Luka
CHAPTER SEVEN ‘Illuminated by a ray of the sun at ­midnight’: The Enchantress of Florence
CHAPTER EIGHT Rushdie’s Non-Fiction
Secularism and the Fatwa
Rushdie’s Political Journalism
Turning Logic Upside Down
CHAPTER NINE Po-fa: Joseph Anton
Names
Po-fa and Migrancy
Po-fa History
Po-fa and Rushdie’s Work
Further Reading
References
Index

✦ Subjects

Literary Criticism, Biography,