Paper Title
SOCIETAL REFLECTIONS AND PROJECTION IN INDIAN FICTIONAbstract
Literature and society have always remained inseparable from each other. Literature cannot sustain without society. Most of the writers are influenced by the issues surfacing in the society and address them in their writings. The themes, subjects and style of writing keep changing with the course of time. Thus, Indian writing in English is a store house of narratives. The factors that shaped the growth of the Indian literature in English arose from the political and social problems of a colonized country and from indigenous narrative traditions of ancient culture. The socio-political movement that caught the imagination of the entire nation also inspired the Indian novelists in English. Right from the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, Indian novelists started focusing their attention largely on contemporary problems. The Indian fiction in English attained its maturity and wide acclaim in the post-independence era. The writers of this period did not concern with old fashioned ideas but imbibed a new freedom. The recent fictional writings have registered a marked shift. Instead of informing a typical Indian cultural background and traditional Indian cultural ethos, they exhibit global concerns through the presentation of multi-cultural reality. The expansion of the scope of their thematic concerns and development of new forms of expression. Literature stands as a mirror to the current happenings of the society. There are a variety of engaging narratives, traditional, innovative, literary and commercial, Women’s writing, crime fiction, terror novels, science fiction, campus novels, animal novels, LGBT voices, dalit writing, children’s writing, narratives of myth and fantasy, philosophical novels, historical novels, postcolonial and multicultural narratives– all presenting new structures in their portrayal of human predicament.
KEYWORDS : Literature, Society, Socio-political, narratives, thematic concerns