Cosmopolitanism in Selected Novels

Abstract

This thesis attempts to explore cosmopolitanism as a perspective in terms of its different frames of space, identity and language in The Shadow Lines (1988) and In An Antique Land (1992) by the Indian novelist-cum-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh and No One Sleeps In Alexandria (1996) and Birds ofAmber (2000) by the Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Abdel Meguid. Cosmopolitanism is examined as a perspective of diversity rather than polarity and hybridity rather than binarity, a structural conceptual and cultural frame that supersedes any bounded and reified constructs of ideology, identity or geography. The thesis thus joins contemporary post-colonial and cultural studies debates on the need to formulate a middle ground between Eurocentric universalism and liberalism on the one hand and cultural relativism and absolutist essentialism on the other. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the tension of difference across the various categories and levels of the national and global, the metropolitan and peripheral, the urban and rural, the public and personal, the sacred and secular, the high and popular, the masculine and feminine, and the historical and fictional, can coexist in a hybrid cosmopolitan model of conviviality and diversity.