In an Antique Land

In An Antique Land is an ethnography written in narrative form by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh.

In An Antique Land
AuthorAmitav Ghosh
CountryIndia
LanguageEnglish
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherRavi Dayal Publishers
Publication date
1992
Media typePrint (hardback)
ISBN0679727833
Followed byDancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma 

Summary

The book contains two narratives. The first, an anthropological narrative, revolves around two visits made by Ghosh to two villages in the Nile Delta, while he was writing his doctoral dissertation (1980–81) and again a few years later (1988). In the second narrative, presented parallel to the first one in the book, Ghosh reconstructs the history of a 12th-century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju, and his slaves Ashu and Bomma, using documents from the Cairo Geniza.[1]

Commentary

In an Antique Land is considered to be a stylistically curious book. Written after the success of Ghosh's first two books, The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines, and written more than a decade after the dissertation on which the book is based, In an Antique Land defies easy description and has been called "generically indefinable" and could be labelled as "narrative, travel book, autobiographical piece, historical account".[2]

References
  1. Desai, Gaurav. "Old World Orders: Amitav Ghosh and the Writing of Nostalgia". Representations. California University Press. 85 (Winter 2004): 125–148. JSTOR 10.
  2. Srivastava, Neelam. "Amitav Ghosh's Ethnographic Fictions: Intertextual Links between In An Antique Land and His Doctoral Thesis" (PDF). The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Sage Publications. 36 (June 2001): 45–64. doi:10.1177/002198940103600205. Retrieved 11 April 2011.

Sources


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.