The influence of English on various Indian kinds of literature during the nineteenth century has been circumstantially described by literary scholars and social scientists, who generally agree that the nature of this cultural contact was amazingly creative. However scant attention is paid to the entire scale of influence mechanism and to the fundamental linguistic aspects of cultural contact.
This study by Professor Bhalchandra Nemade, a well-known creative writer and scholar in Marathi, is perhaps the first systematic attempt at analysing the nature and type of the linguistic influence of English on major Indian literature as part of Indian acculturation of the nineteenth century. The study has developed a comparative literary concept of influence invoking the entire scale of specific socio-linguistic processes active at the deeper level of society.
A work of real originality, it is a remarkable analysis of how a native linguistic system adjusts itself to the new conditions under the pressure of a dominant culture, selects and gradually transforms the alien values into its subsystems during the prolonged colonial period of culture contact, still retaining the age-old aesthetic systems on the strength of the nativist principle. The model of the analysis of linguistic influence constructed in this study may prove to be a fundamental framework for the study of literary influence as well. Invaluable for students of comparative literature and linguistics, it is a book of vital importance to anyone interested in nineteenth-century India.
ISBN No: 9788179918067
No. Of Pages: 264
Language: English
Cover: Paperback
Year Of Publication: 1990
