Description: A study of the origins, nature and role of fantasy literature in early 19th century colonial India, this book explores how speculative writing was produced in the context of, and in resistance to, empire.
Brief description: Mayurika Chakravorty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (Childhood and Youth Studies program), Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She was a Felix doctoral scholar and holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK. She was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research in Children's Literature at Cambridge for the Easter Term, 2024. She researches and writes on fantasy and speculative literature; children's literature; and the representation of childhood and girlhood in literature and media.
Review Quotes: "Mayurika Chakravorty's Fantasy and the Politics of Subversion: Speculative Writing in Colonial India is a significant intervention not only in South Asian literary scholarship but also in the global conversations about fantasy as a form of political subversion ... [it] deserves critical attention as a significantly valuable text for its contextual and textual rigour, deep engagement with the politics of genre, and interrogation of colonial reasoning, which extends and enriches postcolonial literary studies by positioning fantasy as an epistemic intervention rather than escapism." --Global South Literary Studies