This talk is part of an effort to retrofit the theory of the novel in two ways: first quite literally by framing a theory of the novel alongside novels that are contemporary with the theory. The second impulse is to review the kinds of novels included in our theories: might including anti-literary works from around the world revise what we know of the novel and its robust global circulation? In short, the talk is an attempt to develop a twenty-first century theory of the novel that arrives from twenty-first century novels.
Priya Joshi is a book historian and scholar of narrative who has published on the history and theory of the novel and Bollywood cinema. She is the author of 2 scholarly monographs and a co-edited volume. Bollywood’s India: A Public Fantasy (Columbia UP, 2015); In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (Columbia 2002 and Oxford 2003; winner of the MLA’s Prize for the Best First Book, the Sonia Rudikoff Prize for Best First Book in Victorian Studies, among others); and The 1970s and its Legacies in India’s Cinemas (Routledge 2014). Joshi is currently writing a book that rethinks the theory of the novel based on anti-literary forms such as detective and pulp fictions produced outside the metropolis.