Colonial India in a Crusades Mirror: Fantasy and Reality in a Nineteenth-Century Urdu Novel
This article extends Georg Lukács's theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar's Urdu Malik al-'Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Musli...
| Published in: | Sophia |
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| Subtitles: | "Special Issue on Steps to a Global Thought: Thinking from Elsewhere (pp. 411–611)" |
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Springer Netherlands
2023
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| In: |
Sophia
Year: 2023, Volume: 62, Issue: 3, Pages: 419-432 |
| Further subjects: | B
Crusades
B Urdu B Lukács B Sharar B Historical fiction B India |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article extends Georg Lukács's theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar's Urdu Malik al-'Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Muslims and Christians during the crusades in the twelfth century is used to counter the colonial Indian present in the nineteenth century. I suggest that novels such as Sharar's exemplify a vein of global thought since the nineteenth century that resisted historicism but without abandoning the notion that the past was real. Deploying a genre that came to the fore in colonial conditions, Sharar imagines an alternative future by narrating the past otherwise via fiction. |
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| ISSN: | 1873-930X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Sophia
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1007/s11841-023-00961-4 |