Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

Rogues In The Postcolony: The New Picaresque And The Making Of Modern India, Stacey Balkan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rogues in the Postcolony looks at Indian picaresque novels that respond to and productively complicate dominant historical narratives by adapting formal conventions of the picaresque novel and by foregrounding the experiences of historically obscured figures, or “rogues.” The project is structured in such a way as to read colonial and postcolonial India through the lens of marginalized persons such as poppy farmers and, more recently, the citizens of Bhopal who continue to struggle with the toxic legacy of the Union Carbide fertilizer factory in their city. I argue that the unreliable narration and non-teleological structure of the picaresque form parody …