TY - JOUR
T1 - Desire, sanity and the middlebrow aesthetic
T2 - The case of Triveni’s Sharapanjara
AU - Prabhu, Gayathri
N1 - Funding Information:
Sharapanjara https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8614-0087 Prabhu Gayathri Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India Gayathri Prabhu, Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Planetarium Complex, Alevoor Road, Manipal, Karnataka 576104, India. Email: gayathri.prabhu@manipal.edu 10 2019 0021989419878487 © The Author(s) 2019 2019 SAGE Publications Two landmark novels appeared in the same year (1965) in Kannada literature — U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Triveni’s last novel, Sharapanjara . While the former got enshrined into the Indian modernist canon (the Navya movement), Triveni’s work has stayed mostly in the realms of popular literature for women. This article seeks to make a case to read Sharapanjara in light of recent scholarship on popular modernism and on the middlebrow novel, especially the feminine middlebrow. Depicting the chilling unspooling of a woman’s mental health, recovery and relapse, within the constraints and duplicities of domestic space, this novel makes several bold thematic and stylistic forays. The article analyses Sharapanjara as a text whose double vision about desire and insanity, both in its treatment of the subject as well as its nuanced narrative structure, elicits new articulations of extreme alienation and discrimination at the very cusp where the domestic and the public collapse into each other. Kannada literature Indian novel Triveni modernism Navya movement Sharapanjara women’s writing U. R. Ananthamurthy mental health Samskara edited-state corrected-proof Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Gayathri Prabhu https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8614-0087
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Two landmark novels appeared in the same year (1965) in Kannada literature — U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Triveni’s last novel, Sharapanjara. While the former got enshrined into the Indian modernist canon (the Navya movement), Triveni’s work has stayed mostly in the realms of popular literature for women. This article seeks to make a case to read Sharapanjara in light of recent scholarship on popular modernism and on the middlebrow novel, especially the feminine middlebrow. Depicting the chilling unspooling of a woman’s mental health, recovery and relapse, within the constraints and duplicities of domestic space, this novel makes several bold thematic and stylistic forays. The article analyses Sharapanjara as a text whose double vision about desire and insanity, both in its treatment of the subject as well as its nuanced narrative structure, elicits new articulations of extreme alienation and discrimination at the very cusp where the domestic and the public collapse into each other.
AB - Two landmark novels appeared in the same year (1965) in Kannada literature — U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Triveni’s last novel, Sharapanjara. While the former got enshrined into the Indian modernist canon (the Navya movement), Triveni’s work has stayed mostly in the realms of popular literature for women. This article seeks to make a case to read Sharapanjara in light of recent scholarship on popular modernism and on the middlebrow novel, especially the feminine middlebrow. Depicting the chilling unspooling of a woman’s mental health, recovery and relapse, within the constraints and duplicities of domestic space, this novel makes several bold thematic and stylistic forays. The article analyses Sharapanjara as a text whose double vision about desire and insanity, both in its treatment of the subject as well as its nuanced narrative structure, elicits new articulations of extreme alienation and discrimination at the very cusp where the domestic and the public collapse into each other.
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U2 - 10.1177/0021989419878487
DO - 10.1177/0021989419878487
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85074326126
SN - 0021-9894
VL - 57
SP - 448
EP - 461
JO - Journal of Commonwealth Literature
JF - Journal of Commonwealth Literature
IS - 2
ER -
