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Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas
Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.
In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …