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Comparative Literature in India in the Twenty-first Century

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Abstract

This paper traverses the length and breadth of the scholarly debates shaping and reshaping Comparative Literature in India in the twenty-first century. The paper examines and compares the notion of world literature as propounded by Goethe and Tagore’s concept of ‘Vishva Sahitya’. It advocates a need to look beyond the Eurocentric and binary oppositional concepts of comparative literature and seeks a model which is more positive and unitarian and less utilitarian in nature. The paper looks at the writers from Indian subcontinent such as Gurudev Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and many poets and authors such as Umashankar Joshi in Gujarati, Shamsher Bahadur Singh in Hindi and Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’ in Urdu who provide the models for such a study.

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Singh, A.K. (2017). Comparative Literature in India in the Twenty-first Century. In: Rao Garg, S., Gupta, D. (eds) The English Paradigm in India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5332-0_2

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