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Tickell, Alex
(2020).
Abstract
This article reflects on formal and technical similarities in the writing of Arundhati Roy and Rumer Godden through a close parallel examination of three works by Godden: Black Narcissus (1939), The River (1946), and The Peacock Spring (1975) and Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). I use the possibility of an unrecognized dialogue between Godden’s and Roy’s fictions to tackle the broader issue of “influence” as a critical-conceptual elephant in the room of postcolonial literary studies: something that can only be spoken of in certain ways, using a certain vocabulary. I ask why certain critical assumptions—amongst them the politics of “writing back,” a kind of ironic formal auto-critique and a tendency to avoid “vertical” comparison between earlier and later texts in the post/colony except as a resistant form of reiterative citation—have made the question of “influence” a peculiarly difficult one to pose (and to answer) in postcolonial literary contexts.