NEW SOUTH ASIAN-AMERICAN FICTION: MERGENCE OF A NEW GENRE?

Abstract

This paper, uNew South Asian-American Fiction:
Emergence of a New Genre?" focuses on a group of emerging
South Asian-American novelists in the last decade, who give a
new consciousness to fiction. With their multicultural,
multireligious, multilingual and multiethnic traditions, the
newly discovered writers settled in America are growing fast
with new identity. Gifted with tremendous creative eneTgY, they
seize and give artistic shape to experiences in America.
Enjoying a certain degree of critical contributions, their
writings, as a distinct area of literary study, are unlike the other
migrant ones which mostly have reflected the angst and trauma
of the 'Nowhere man '. Their fictional writings have acquired a
shape of spiritual quest that yields eventually towards a sense
of equilibrium, establishing the in-between space as one of
creativity, enrichment, and survival. The paper tries to show
how the current crop of the South Asian writers in America
creates a literary tradition that is formally and thematically
different with a special reference to Manil Suri's The Death of
VIShnu. With a spirit of religious revivalism, they try to re-make
themselves in writing a new genre and new form beingforged.
Their individual styles, new idioms, and diversity of thematic
patterns also point to the changing complexions of lndianAmerican
Literature.