Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and constructions of identity in the Anglo-Indian novel
Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Award with the University of Exeter and The British Library to research and study the archive of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013), a writer whose oeuvre ranges across novels, short stories, poetry and screenplays. In her work, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has thematised dislocation, the experience of exile, the complexities of what it means to ‘belong’ to a culture, and the relationship between East and West. Jhabvala’s archive has recently been acquired by the British Library and the award holder will be the first scholar to gain access to this new, rich resource, which comprises drafts of all of her prose works, along with other working material, notebooks, diaries, and a small amount of publishing correspondence relating to her prose writing and plays. It also includes some digital material.
As well as exploiting the archive in academic terms, the award holder will create a working catalogue of it and be its champion for the duration of the project. It is envisaged that the award holder will engage with the novels, short stories and manuscripts of the Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Archive to examine her engagement with female and diasporic identities in her fiction, focussing on notions of dislocation and new identity formations and how Jhabvala explores these in different settings and historical contexts. Work on her personal archive will be supplemented by an engagement with the India Office Collections also held at the British Library. By drawing on much hitherto unavailable archival material, it is expected that the thesis will add substantially to knowledge of this neglected writer, as well as to the study of literary representations of the British Raj, new formulations of diasporic studies, cultural inheritance and exile, as well as form the basis for a comparative analysis of these questions of dislocation in the work of other writers of Indian heritage.
For more information please follow the link:
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=1858
Closing date: Sunday 31 May 2015
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