Dissenters and Mavericks Writings About India in English, 1765-2000 [Hardcover]

Dissenters and Mavericksreinvigorates the interdisciplinary study of literature, history, and politics through an approach to reading that allows the voices heard in writing a chance to talk back, to exert pressure on the presuppositions and preferences of a wide range of readers. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts--from colonial writers such as Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke to twentieth-century Indian writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and Pankaj Mishra--the book proposes a controversial challenge to prevailing academic methodology in the field of postcolonial studies.

Sabin's engagement with her unusual subject is always meticulous and intelligent; and welcome, too, given that it focuses on a nation and a class whose intelligentsia takes itself so seriously. --Times Literary Supplement

Generous, humane.... It would be an opportunity lost if postcolonial critics did not take up the challenge that Sabin's ceaselessly responsive readings cumulatively pose. --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Margery Sabin'sDissenters and Mavericksis, in effect, a moral history of British and postcolonial India, but it could only have been written by a gifted literary scholar. The chapters on Naipaul, Sleeman, and Burke are enormously suggestive, and all of the book will reorient the thoughts of readers who had glimpsed only episodes where Sabin discovers continuity. The book is a splendid achievement--original in conception and steadily rewarding in the detail of its judgments. --David Bromwich, Yale University

Tough-minded and written with exemplary clarity,Dissenters and Maverickswill stir controversy and in fact invites it, for it is in itself an act of dissent from the current orthodoxies of postcolonial studies. Margery Sabin's work marks a new stage in our attempts to deal with the history of writing about India in Englishl£.