Conférence de Michael Hutt, SOAS Londres

le mardi 18 février 2014, à 18H00 dans la salle de conférences, au premier étage du Musée Cernuschi, 7 avenue Vélasquez, 75008 PARIS.

The paper will summarise the content of these novels and provide some translated extracts. It will then analyse and discuss them, with a particular focus on (a) Dhakal’s, Dharabasi’s, and Pathak’s use of the past (b) the influence of the Maoist insurgency and the imprint of Maoist ideology (c) the location of each novel’s central protagonist in relation to urban metropolitan perspectives and (d) implied and actual readerships. The paper will explore the sociological significance of the commercial success of several of these books in light of the increasingly close relationship between Nepali literature and the Nepali print media. Finally, it will ask whether the expansion of the readership for Nepali novels in recent years is a sign that the Nepali novel is now breaking out of the narrow elite sphere of ‘art literature’ and becoming a part of what Ashish Nandy calls ‘the popular’.