Bloomsbury Academic India's Forests, Real and Imagined: Writing the Modern Nation

As they seek to explore evolving and conflicting ideas of nationhood and modernity, India’s writers have often chosen forests as the dramatic setting for stories of national identity. India’s Forests, Real and Imagined explores how these settings have been integral to India sense of national consciousness. Alan Johnson demonstrates that modern writers have drawn on older Indian literary traditions of the forest as a place of exile, trial and danger to shape new ideas of India as a modern nation. The book casts new light on a wide range of modern writers, from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay – widely regarded as the first Indian novelist – to contemporary authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri as well as local attitudes to nationhood and the environment across the country. About the Author Alan Johnson is Professor of English at Idaho State University, USA. He is the author of Out of Bounds: Anglo-Indian Literature and the Geography of Displacement (2001) and articles on topics ranging from environmental literature in India to Hindi film