Time, History and Cultural Spaces: Narrative Explorations

This book brings together critical essays on time, history and narrativity and the explorations of these concepts in philosophy, music, art and literature.

The volume provides a comprehensive introduction to narrative theories as well as philosophical discourses on time, memory and the self. Drawing insights from western and eastern philosophy, it discusses themes such as subjectivity and identity in historical narratives, theorization of time in cinema and other arts and the relationship between the understandings of existence, consciousness and concepts such as Kala, Aion, and yugas. The book also looks at the narrativization of history across cultures by exploring modern fiction from China and India, murals of martyrs in Northern Ireland, music and films set against the canvas of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as diasporic cultural histories.

This book will be an interesting read for scholars and researchers of comparative literature, history, philosophy of history, cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

Jayita Sengupta is professor of English at Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, India. She was a British Council Fellow, UK in 2000, a Fulbright-Nehru Teaching Fellow at Stanford University, USA and a teaching fellow to National Kaosiung Normal University and Soochow University in Taiwan in 2013. As a member of the Society for Activities and Research on the Indian World (SARI), France, she has received travel grants for presentations at their Annual Colloquium several times. Her research interests include gender, cultures of memory, narrative and translation studies. Besides academic essays and books, she has also published her visual storybook, comprising four short stories with her paintings, titled Shivelight and Other Stories, 2020. Her English translation of Bani Basu’s novel, titled Gandharvi: Life of a Musician, 2017 was nominated for the Muse India Translation Award in 2018. Jayita is also a Mentor of the Indian Knowledge Systems, a division of the Ministry of Education and is actively engaged in guiding the short research projects of the scholars selected for IKS Internships Programme.