O. V. Vijayan

<p>O.V. Vijayan (1930–2005) was an acclaimed Malayalam novelist, short story writer, cartoonist, translator, columnist, political analyst, and public intellectual. In a literary career spanning almost half a century, he published six novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eight volumes of non-fictional prose, three volumes of reminiscences, three volumes of cartoons, and four self-translations. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of O.V. Vijayan’s work by analysing his fictional and non-fictional works, cartoons, and columns, and situates him in the context of Malayalam literary culture and Indian literature at large.</p><p>The volume discusses themes such as the politics of everyday life; culture, religion, and the changing nature of Indian society; struggles of a writer and thinker; the idea of socially responsive radical modernism; ecology and subculture; and the politics of self-translation. These readings explore Vijayan’s legacy as an iconic figure of modernism in Malayalam fiction who reinvented its language; as an unrelenting critic of the modern nationstate and its excesses; as a post-colonial thinker; and as a visionary who transcended the binaries of the mundane and the magical, the political and the spiritual, and the premodern and the postmodern.</p><p>Part of the <i>Writer in Context </i>series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of Indian literature, Malayalam literature, English literature, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, global south studies, and translation studies.</p>