DISSENTERS AND MAVERICKS: WRITINGS ABOUT INDIA IN ENGLISH, 1765-2000

Dissenters and Mavericks ambitiously reinstates individual authors at the centre of its inquiry into the complex relationship between literature and history. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts, the book joins what is still a tentative movement to open postcolonial studies to the competing values traditionally associated with literary criticism, where the exceptional matters as much as the typical, and analysis seeks to identify the distinctive qualities of thought and language in particular writers. Without proposing an honour roll of heroic dissenters, Margery Sabin discloses the presence of more skeptical questioning and more variety of thought and expression in the record of writing in English about India than the prevailing categories of postcolonial analysis register