Beecroft argues in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel that, if we understand the novel as storytelling in any narrative form indigenous to a particular culture or people, then we must acknowledge the existence of multiple novels, each with distinct temporal and spatial origins. He maintains that storytelling traditions are embedded in every society, and that many of these traditions have complemented, intersected with, or diverged from Western narrative forms (46–48). However, the narrative form canonized as the “novel” in the Western literary tradition has a specific historical and aesthetic origin in ancient Greece. Though the South Asian Anglophone novel is read and critiqued under the British canon, given its distinctive antecedent indigeneity in oral qissa, Daastan traditions, and performative storytelling, the South Asian novel, in its narrative form, builds more through collective and communal concerns than the quintessentially individualistic form of the canonized novel, developed within what Franco Moretti terms the bourgeois realm of order and regularity. Moreover, as Beecroft argues, if storytelling is a form, then we have had different novel forms rather than one singular novel.

Grounded in this context, this panel proposal seeks submissions that closely read, interpret, and/or critique Anglophone South Asian novels or indigenous narratives from of or about South Asia–whether performative, dramatic, oral, poetic, or translated–while critically centering discussion on the formal elements of narrative, their historical development, and their significance in empowering communal existence in the changing interdisciplinary world we inhabit.

Submit your abstract for this panel proposal through NeMLA abstract submission system by visiting the following link by September 30, 2026:

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22378

Selected Bibliography

Beecroft, Alexander. “Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern.” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited by Eric Bulson, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 43–56. Cambridge Core, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659694.004.

Mazzoni, Guido. Theory of the Novel. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi, Harvard University Press, 2017.

Moretti, Franco, editor. The Novel: Volume 2, Forms and Themes. Princeton University Press, 2006.

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India. Oxford University Press, 1985.